Is spaceship armor useless?

[Lamech]

A couple tricks for point defense:

1) Fire your point defense before proximity weapons detonate. If you use tactical combat you are allowed to fire on the salvos, and you should be able to in non-tactical combat as well.

2) Nukes make hilariously effective point defense. They wipe a whole hex of salvos. Nuke incoming nukes.

3) Tertiary very rapid fire. You can't rapid fire missiles

4) Only use some of your RoF against each attack. Good targetting AIs should have very high skills, and also have a nice technique for dividing fire. (Which actually doesn't seem to apply because "All targets must be specified before rolling to hit." does not apply to saving RoF with point defense.)

If you have point defense, it should more or less automagically wipe out the incoming missiles, even with proximity fuses. Guns can even the playing field a little, but you need to get close. Now what you could do is fire "heavy missiles" a.k.a. heavily armored ships that can tank point defense while ramming the target ship. Which answers the question: Armor is not useless, it is what lets you survive point defense!