Shields

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Humabout

Its worth noting that if your ships mount any ohysical armor, two systems of SotA armor will generally be sufficient to stop SotA energy weapons of 3 to 4 SMs smaller. No amount of shield ablation would help in this case. Ways around this include making all armor ablative, too, or unsurprisingly, don't give ships 2 systems of SotA physical armor. Just be aware that this artifact can happen.

They need to be unstreamlined (which is indeed appropriate for capital ships) and have 2 systems in each hull section dedicated to armor, which is pretty substantial (30% of the ship's mass is in armor*). And doing this doesn't protect them from the fighters aiming at weakpoints (at -10 to hit, true, but the bonus from the capital ship's SM offsets this markedly) - you need 4 armor sections (60% of the ship's mass is in armor, at which point it's dense enough that it's targeted at -1) to protect from that. Well, under Spaceships 1 rules anyway - needed armor modules is reduced if using the more realistic armor volume rules from Pyramid #3/34. Regardless, you're talking about some very heavily armored ships. If using the optional rules for exposed radiators, those can't be protected by armor (at least, not while exposed), so the fighters can take those out, forcing the target to basically shut down in 30 minutes - a solid mission kill that can set it up for proper destruction (either by heavies or a boarding party, depending on the feel you're going for).

All that said, that's a pretty good observation, and something to keep in mind if you want primarily energy weapons.


*For reference, a Main Battle Tank built using Spaceships would likely have somewhere around 60% of its mass in armor.