What ctishman suggests is basically what I planned on implementing, eventually. Whether the explanation is a "shield" or whatever, it requires a certain amount of damage per unit time before the defensive properties are negated (for a brief time) and the craft becomes (more) vulnerable. The actual time and damage settings themselves are less important, and would probably emerge from testing, potentially becoming another differentiating factor between ships/equipment/etc.

I'm not sure exactly *how* I would like to go about doing this, whether as an addon (ideally) or a property of the ship (less ideal) or whatever, but I think the general idea is pretty sound.

You could have the base ship damage threshold boosted by addons - Like in Privateer, where there were a few basic armors. Cap ships in this game would start with the basic armor ( I think it was plastisteel or something) and could be upgraded to higher armor levels which would have higher damage thresholds.

Have armor weigh a LOT, which would give the pilot of the capship the option of removing it for an acceleration/speed boost.

I thought this discussion was worth dredging up in light of the new cap ships and border war.

I'm all in favor of making cap ships less vulnerable to blaster fire, that way you have need of bombers loaded with heavy-hitting torpedoes and missiles to go against cap ships, and the fighters primary role would be to defend these bombers or go after the enemy's bombers. Teamwork!

I think the armor plating suggestion at the bottom of page 1 (referenced by incarnate) is a great idea. It addresses the surface area issue elegantly since a large cap ship would naturally have more plates than a small cap ship. The target area would remain roughly the same as far as fighters are concerned, as they would be trying to "overheat" a single plate in either case.

Is there some reason people do NOT like the idea of simply giving cap-ship armor a per-hit damage reduction factor in addition to destructible subsytems and some autorepair? I mean, sure the armor plating bit sounds nifty and is more complicated, but I do not see a good reason for it. Thanks for enlightenment.

I think the key thing is that fighters (or bombers for that matter) could still pose a threat to cap ships by continuously coordinating their fire on a single spot, whereas with a straight damage reduction it wouldn't make a difference, unless the ship was armored differently in different areas.

Not sure if it really matters or not, but that's the difference as I see it.

I'm sure other people may view things differently...

Um one question. Are there any people here that can take down a Teradon Firgate alone? Using energy weapons only??? In my case I can barely scratch it before I have to rebase for repairs (if I survive) using swarms in a Rag lets me to damage the SLOWLY, nothing to make me a real threat to a Teradon during say a BS.

Yeah, that seems to be the difference. I am wondering why there is a debate. It doesn't matter if you have 10,000 9mm rounds fired at a modern MBT, you still aren't going to hurt it, not even if they hit within a couple-second timeframe...