Is spaceship armor useless?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Mirtai

In my experience, Spaceship armor does have a use. Without armor, anyone with Beam weapons will chew you up.

Beam weapons are very accurate, and they cross the distance between ships at (literally) the speed of light.

For example, I was in a playtest where a fighter with 6 missile launchers fought a larger ship with only point defense lasers. The fighter fired from about 2000 miles out... and the ship with the laser turrets destroyed the fighter in the first 20 seconds of return fire from it's lasers...

Meanwhile, the missiles were still accelerating, and wouldn't arrive for several minutes. While the missiles were smaller targets, the laser turrets had tons of time to blow them all away before they arrived. None of the missiles made it even half way.

Now, if the fighter had been well armored, the point defence lasers couldn't have harmed it, and it could have fired all it's missiles to overwhelm the laser turret's point defence, or closed the distance to give the target less time to defend.

At TL 9, it's actually pretty easy to have enough armor to soak most beam weapon fire... and, as it has been pointed out elsewhere, you can shoot down balistic and missile attacks with your beams. But since you cannot shoot other people's laser beams out of the sky, the only defence vs them is armor... so get some if you want to survive past the first 20 seconds of a fight.

Did you re-run the playtest without the assumption that the missile boat would for some reason start the engagement inside of laser range?