It would be an interesting addition to the game play customization as well as strategy if there were several different armor types that were available for each ship. THese would not be full fledged varriants, but more of a stratigic decision about a ship attribute.

The implimentation would require that all weapons be seperated into different groups. Missles/rockets/energy/rail/ etc. Then various armor types would be chosen for each group, so you might have missle resistant armor, which reduces missle damage by 30% but then all energy energy weapons would gain a 15% bonus (because you shoot more rounds of energy than missles) thus fighter might not want to have missle armor, becasue its easy enough to evade them, but might prefer to have rocket armor, or energy armor, since those are the greatest threats he has. Thus pilots would be able to choose their armor bonus according to the style in which they prefer to fight, which ideally would add some more variation in the types of combat we see, where perhaps its not as important that the valk not engage the prom with the agt, becuase it would have anti energy armor, but at the same time the rail gun users in the rev c would be a greater threat, because perhaps energy armor has a penalty for rail's. and then there could always be the standard armor which could have no bonuses and no penalties for those who don't want to change, or want to be equally prepared for anything.

The idea is nice but the most common armor would be energy since most weapons used are energy based. If there were more weapons that used physical ammunition then it could work out but the issue is that you only need to dodge the ammo based weapons and take the energy based armor for safety against the Gat Turret.

THis would mean that all Rev C ships would be equipped with energy resistant armor and then with the aagility of the ship the ship would be considered even more uber.

as a counter, rails could be used against rev c's, if the energy armor was week against rails, then then the light armor of the rev c and the damage penalty coupled with the high velocity of the rails could put the rev c between a rock and a hard spot.

I dont think you will hit a Rev C with a Rail... It isn't impossible it is just improbable (unless yo uare using a Rev C or a Vult).

There could be 3 armor types but w/o (1 blocking physical hits, another blocking explosions, and the last blockign energy). There would need to be more ammunition based weapons for the armor to really be worth while.

i was actualy trying to think if a physical gattling connon would work

still you could give these equimentslots to the bigger ships. The ones that have it harder to dodge normal energyweapons. In stead of constantly playing with the agility. this way you don't have to give a ship 40k hps just to counter its inability to dodge.

Not to mention that it would help slightly in making other shipoptions more usefull.

Or just give bigger ships more of these armorslots.

aka:

light ship : 0 armorslots 2 electronics slots
medium ship: 1 armor slot , 2 electronics shots
heavy ships: 2 armorslots, 1 electronicsslot
XL ship (frigateclass): 5 armorslots, 3 electronicsslots

BUT a more balanced idea naturally