I asked this when i saw a pre-release version.  As far as I'm aware a 10 hull ship would have to spend more on thrust than a 5 hull 5 armour ship.  Both can take 10 damage, but one is smaller and potentially faster where as the other is larger, able to carry more but slower.

Don't know if this works in practice though.

I hope that a "Ignore Armor" weapon trait or any other trait that damages armor more than usual never becomes part of Starmada Nova Edition.  Use Catastrophic damage if you want to ravage armor or hull...

I know I'm the only one who cares about this, but: how would you model Traveller meson weapons? They are stopped by shields, could be avoided by ECM, but ignores armor (and hull?) entirely, causing system damage, internal explosions and radiation damage. Riddle me this: I want a weapon that causes no end of havoc, but leaves a ship's armor and possibly hull entirely untouched.

I took my Standard Design BB Arizona which had 25 armor and 20 hull, and is on my accound on the DryDock.  On the drydock, I changed it to 45 hull.  The cost remained at 422 and the speed I kept at 4; no changes except the change to all hull.  This leaves me with 3360 spaces.  This No-Armor, Big Hull version of my Standard Dreadnought is actually much less vulnerable to being taken over by Marines.  I honestly see not much advantage to having armor, except that I like having Armor!!
If a trait is ever developed that makes a weapon more effective against armor, I will merely change all the armor to hull.  If a ship design changes all the armor to hull, (getting a much a bigger hull) the idea that it will not be able to keep the same thrust  is simply Not true.  My ship will gain over 3360 spaces...  Perhaps I will reduce the armor and increase the thrust to 5...

:idea: Continued, I was able to change the thruse of the 45 Hull version of the Arizona to 6.  This increases the ship cost by only 20 points.  And the ship still has over 1500 spaces.  This has me reconsidering this "Standard Design".  A thrust of 6 gives a ship many more movement options than thrust 4...

Good Grief, I am now rethinking my designs.  This discussion has had an unintended Outcome. :shock:

I have redesigned this ship, reducing the armor by a lot, and increasing the hull some.  I have also added closerange AA guns.  I will post the changes on the B-Basin Nova section.

Oh yeah, you're right...  it does specifically mention crossing off armor boxes.  I guess we were extrapolating from AE, where marines cared not about Armor Plating.  This way is rather counterintuitive, though...  "Yes, let us take and hold this piece of external armor plating!"  "Sarge, isn't this where we're most likely to be vaporized by incoming fire?"  "It's called a beachhead, trooper."  "But 7th Platoon has already taken engineering; we don't need a beachhead.  Shouldn't we be inside, killing crewmen and taking the bridge?"  "..."

On the one hand, it would be kinda neat if marines acted as an anti-armor weapon.  On the other hand, armor doesn't need the counter.

Marines dont cripple systems, so by having them damage both weapons and armor its easier for the rest of your ships to cripple systems, as your marines have undermined a portion of their hull.  Or at least thats how id use them.  I regret not using my specifically designed assault ship to try such a thing when we were play testing. 

As to whether or not to take armor, i like it and its something thats realistic.  As for weapons that bypass armor, does that mean you would like a +X shift on ships that have more hull?  I see where your coming from, but at the same time even PRC doesnt completely negate shields.  If you pay for something you should get some use out of it, for instance my ships dont have shields, but have a lot of armor.  I went the "I know exactly how much my ships can take" route rather that then "Im paying for a chance to stop some bullets".  Sure you can just go more hull for no difference and some extra space, but how fluffy is that? 

If ya like armor horray!
If ya dont horray!

Seems kind of a either or kind of thing.

I am considering a house rule that for every 5 full boxes of Armor you would normally get, you get 1 'FREE' box of Armor.  So too bad for certain hull/Armor combinations, and the smallest vessels couldn't get a free box either, but my friends seem to want this to work, so I'll be trying to balance it in. (One friend is definately a '1900 - 1950' naval junkie).   My friends like armor and and it's destruction. 
We are also are considering a Semi effective 'Anti-Armor'  kind of weapon trait which has three versions : skip 1st armor, skip first 3 armor, skip first 5 armor style of damage (nothing would modify the armor skip value - this may chance when I get Nova).  These anti-armor traits would be tied to the spaces a certain race's weapon took up.   Weapons under a certain space size would get no bonus, and weapons from x to y spaces get skip 1st armor, from y to z spaces get skip first 3 armor, and weapons above z spaces get the skip first 5 armor.
How much exra space would you add to a weapon to get the 'skip first 2 un-destroyed armor' trait; and remember that the really big vessels in this campaign will be getting a nice amount of 'Free' armor if they go that way, so you'll want some sort of anti-armor tech hehehehe.  It cant be much or you really would just buy another weapon, but cost wise, its a trait that cost  a little extra space and not your cash. I also suspect my friend will want his fighters to have a skip 1st armor wpn trait for his fighters as well, but that will have to cost him a little cash as there is no space to trade up to; but that is if the anti-armor fighter trait is allowed at all.

hmmm....
I always design my ships within a setting so armor is just part of that setting. 

But as a direct test I stole    the Commonwealth STEADFAST-class Armored Cruiser (apologies to the designer) from the drydock sandbox and directly changed the armor into hull converted it to Commonwealth STEAD-OF-class Un Armored Cruiser ! The break points did change with Damaged now being one box fewer and Crippled more more, due I suspect to rounding. The CR remains the same and there is no difference in the game performance of the ship but you now have 1073 SU spare as apposed to 117 for the Steadfast. :?  You can see the results in the sandbox.

Conclusion armor is pretty pointless in the game.  :shock:

To easily 'fix' it my initial thought is to agree with RobinStirzaker to put the all the armor in the first undamaged section making an armored the ship more robust, by delaying the first check point, than a ship consisting solely hull. How to adjust the defensive rating I'm not sure. I leave the fancy maths to those with fancy calculators.

Another solution is to make armor some how different from hull within the game, such as 'Ignore armor' or 'armor only' with all that entails and I do understand the arguments against that approach.

A third option is to remove armor from the rules along side Carronades and Long-range Scanners. 

My initial reaction when I saw how armor behaved was to imagine that you can have many armor points for one hull point, ie, you lose space for weapons, other protections, drive, etc. and you earn some more protection. Trading one hull to obtain one armor is pointless.

Marc

Normally, armor should just be another system using SU. But to have a raison d'etre, one point of HULL should give many points of armor (how much, I don't know).
Otherwise, it would just be a waste of hull space, just because that hull point would have the same resistance as a armor point and gives you SU to add many things, which the armor doesn't!

Marc