Wise words here, I wasn’t assuming the same amount of material. But you bring up an intersting issue. We put armor in INTERNAL modules in this game. Why? You should add armor to the outside of the ship. But maybe we are adding the infrastructure/superstructure needed to support the additional armor/weight.
If we are adding armor to the internals of the ship the volume of a module on a cruiser is bigger than the volume of the modules on a frigate. The cruiser is bigger but someone would have to work out the math to figure out how much armor in thickness is added for cruiser and frigate modules respectively. Hull size matters to these equations.
Why? The volume of a cruiser module is bigger than the volume of a frigate module. It therefore stands to reason that the frigate module should support less armor than a cruiser module. Which is exactly the case. The frigate module holds 31 armor, while the cruiser module holds 74 armor. By determining the total armor value of all armor modules, divided by the maximum number of modules available, you get the average armor. By determining the total amount of armor material divided by the total volume, you get the thickness of armor.
Yes and no. Hull size between ships of the same class should only matter in so far that the amount modules available on a hull should be in some direct proportion to the size of the hull – smaller hulls should have less module space than larger hulls.
The end result is that if you devoted 50% of the available modules to nothing but armor on two different sized ships of the same class, the larger ship would have more armor thickness. However, that would involve using more material (more total armor modules) which would cause the ship to be heavier and more expensive.
However, if you devoted only the same amount of material (say, 1 armor module)to each ship, the smaller ship (less total module space) would have more thickness (average armor) than the larger ship.
You might have a formula there that would work. There is only one thing you’re over looking is volume grows exponentially. And surface area linerally.
A Federation Fox Frigate is 90 meters long.
Let’s say 10 meters round (we’ll think of them as cylinders).
And has 11 modules.
A Federation Panther Cruiser is 160 Meters long.
Let’s say 20 meters round.
And has 15 modules.
Fox volume per module: 71 m cubed
Fox surface area: 2984 m squared
Panther volume per module: 3351 m cubed
Panther surface area: 10681 m squared
The Panther module volume is ~47 times larger than the Fox module volume.
Because of that Cruiser have a lot more material for each module (47 times as much) meaning MUCH thicker armor.
Take 31 armor per module on a frigate times volume (71) and you get 2201, almost the surface area of a frigate. Lets call that “thickness” 1.
Take 74 armor per module on a cruiser times volume (3351) and you get 247974, 23 times the surface area of a cruiser. Lets call that “thickness” 23.
As I said before in a post to make capital ships scale linerally (in a game) you have to make up some story as to why cruisers (or bigger hulls) don’t have as much internal volume.
So, by extension, we can imply that the total volume of the Fox Frigate is 7068 cubic meters by taking 1/2 the diameter, squared, times 3.14159, times 90. That’s roughly 642 cubic meters per module.
So, again, 1/2 diameter, squared, times 3.14159, times 160. That will give us 50,265. Or roughly 3351 cubic meters per module.
That means that Cruiser modules should hold about 5 times more armor than Frigate modules.
Basic Frigate armor weighs has 31 armor and weighs 24 lbs.
Basic Cruiser armor weighs has 74 armor and weighs 92 lbs. Clearly those numbers won’t scale in any way that’s helpful to us.
Frigate Armor III provides 62 armor and weighs 40 lbs.
The best a cruiser can get is Ultraheavy Armor at 145 armor and 160 lbs. This is roughly a factor of x4 between the best armor of each class type.
It may not scale perfectly, but it does scale exponentially between classes.
Besides, matters of length and number of slots available can easily be modded without overhauling the whole system, if that’s the major problem. Even wight and available armor can be modded. But I think the basic concept of Average Armor = armor thickness seems to work out okay for our purposes of analyzing the damage model. The only problem is that there’s no facing, so there’s no way to, for example, add extra armor to the front of the ship only. Or to concentrate fire and weaken the armor in one single area or facing of the ship.
I got slightly different numbers for some reason, but even using your numbers, I think the math for determining thickness is wrong here.
Why would you multiply the armor value of a module times the volume of a module? If I told you that I had 3 crates of apples that could fit in a room, you wouldn’t multiply 3 crates times the volume in the room to see how many crates of apples could fit in there. Only 3 crates fit in the room. Within the volume of a frigate module, you get support for 31 armor. Period. Thickness would be the amount of armor that can fit in a module (assuming you only have 1 armor module), divided by the total surface area of the ship.
If there’s a direct relationship, or could reasonable be a direct relationship, between surface area and number of modules, than Average Armor Value should work fine for determining armor thickness.
(Although I would have preferred if there was an absolute direct relationship between length of the ship and number of module slots. Again, something for a future mod. )