Is spaceship armor useless?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Those settings, insofar as they have technical assumptions at all, have technical assumptions so far from the ones underlying Spaceships that tremendous changes to a bunch of fundamentals are clearly needed to represent them.

Between GURPS and SS being non-setting specific, and the sorts of other stuff that G:SS has as options (up to and including hyperdynamic cosmos), that doesn't seem like something unusual to expect.

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I don't particularly see that it is, no. Although that may be influenced by the fact that I can't imagine how the actual ballistic attack could involve much realtime participation from the missileteer. (Well, it could with outright remote-piloted missiles, but then it would be impossible to control more than one at a time regardless of whether they were in the same salvo.)

(You capitalized Attacks, but I don't think there's really an applicable word-of-art here. If there is, can you point it out?)

I'm capitalising them to distinguish between making one Attack Roll at +x RoF bonus, and doing two at +(x-1) RoF bonus + whatever penalties apply. Examples for non-SS situations distinguishing between one or multiple Attacks / Attack Rolls include: Spraying Fire (the penalty is increased Rcl), Ranged Rapid Strike / Quick-Shooting (RS penalty), DWA (-4/-8), the use of Extra Attacks with Multistrike with one weapon or without firing two weapons (the 'penalty' is the need to fork over [25*x]) etc.
You're rolling your missile skill, so you're not just sitting there while things work without your input.