Is spaceship armor useless?

[SCAR]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Well, that would depend on the exchange rate in 'pewpewpew'. Which given that the defensive weapons are likely VRF will be nowhere remotely near 1:1 unless you use the 'missiles are worthless' variant rule. (Missile Shield, that is.)

I need to grind some numbers PD versus missiles for tactical rules, actually. In final defensive fire, VRF beams are not the equal of fragmenting missiles. But killing all the buses before they get to make their own attack rolls might turn things.

You always take the tiniest missiles available and give each launcher a gunner too, there's no difference there that I can see.

I think you're underestimating Beam PD vs. even Prox. Det. missile attacks.
1 missile, Prox. Det., can score 10 'hits'.
PD with a VRF, Imp Laser get x200 RoF (for +8) with even a low AI Skill of 12 and an average roll of 10, that's 10 hits, which kills all of the missile fragments.

Its true that if even one fragment gets through, the target is pretty much toast, so luck will eventually favour the missile, assuming they don't run out of their limited ammo first.

I personally prefer to use the Alternate HP from David Pulver's Extreme Damage article in Pyramid#3/34 - which means larger vessels can soak a few missile hits with their significantly increased HP.

Prox.Det. ballistic attacks lose their armour divisor, but their base damage is unchanged. I find this a little unsatisfactory, splitting the warhead into 10 fragments should reduce the damage too, I've considered adapting the Shotgun rules for Solid Shot vs. Buckshot and dividing the damage of each fragment by 4 (treat as 1/4 calibre), but I've not played that out to see how it works.