Spaceships hull armor…solid?

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Rupert

If you're feeling generous, call that 'hardened'. Personally, given the mass and energy of the weapons we're looking at, I don't think they'd help much unless both layers of armour were quite think and the gap quite large - enough you couldn't really even call it 'spaced armour', but more like two complete hulls.

My understanding is that since the 1960s, armour schemes against anything more powerful than an autocannon or roadside bomb have focused on spaced layers with air gaps or soft material between them, and that its even less plausible that solid armour would help against threats to high-powered spaceships. But its not my field.

And its not "both layers" but "all n layers" (the Stardust probe on Wikipedia seems to have at least four). Each breaks up and scatters the oncoming projectile until the fragments can be stopped by a feasable thickness of armour.