Heavy armour or light?

[TheHellKat]

I've recently finished a heavy patrol boat, essentially a large grid fighter.

It's hydrogen powered so thrust isn't an issue, I'm using modded guns (mostly as it's really hard to make vanilla guns look cool).

I've used heavy armour for the ship, its primary role is to stand at 1k range and target enemy systems before moving in to finish the job with twin fixed forward mounted cannons (very slow firing but pack a massive punch, kinda inaccurate at anything over 300ish though).

I've used the heavy armour so that it can take a bit of a beating before losing any subsystems.

The ship also has 12 close in point defence turrets so getting down and dirty with fighters isn't an issue.

Anyway my question is this: heavy armour is stupid heavy and kinda expensive, what are your feelings on using heavy over light? If I switch to light the ship gets a significant increase in both acceleration and handling.

Once I've finished working out the last few issues I'll post it to the workshop, I'm rather proud of how this one came out. Simple design but looks really cool.

[ShadedMJ]

I mix armors with decoys. Heavy armor over key front-placed systems and over the decoys, light armor over the rest of the front.

[Husker_85]

One of the reasons I insist on playing with shields is how non-viable heavy armor seems to be.

[Weaver]

Mix the armor, use heavy in the places most likely to take fire. For a long range ship that will be mostly likely the front end.
If it's unlikely for a ship to get behind you or solidly on your flank, the heavy armor is a waste on those sides and also reduces your mobility to keep your heavy armor and weapons directed at the enemy.

[Johnny]

Heavy everything, with gravity drives and lots of gyros for agility. If you can turn on on a dime with full heavy, you will have no weak sides....

[Buzzard]

Also, with the decoys, armored or not, there's nothing that says the decoys must remain mounted to your ship. Ideally, you want the decoys out front, drawing fire, but... off to the sides or something. Oddly enough, decoys don't even need to be powered to be really attractive for most weapons systems.

[TheHellKat]

I'm planning on removing the large cargo container (has a couple smalls anyway) so I could use that space to add in a decoy printer /w merge block...

[Raider Deci]

All I know with heavy is that things suddenly requires alot more resources.

[Weaver]

Originally posted by Buzzard:

Also, with the decoys, armored or not, there's nothing that says the decoys must remain mounted to your ship. Ideally, you want the decoys out front, drawing fire, but... off to the sides or something. Oddly enough, decoys don't even need to be powered to be really attractive for most weapons systems.

I have several ships with decoy launchers. You just use a welder, merge block, and projector. This works really well on small ships now that there are small merge blocks, as you can weld up and releases a half dozen at once with a single welder, and set up a field of decoys to draw fire.

[TheHellKat]

I've gone through and replaced all the heavy armour with light except for the nose and I've stripped out the large cargo, just need to move things around in the interior. I don't want the decoys to deploy directly behind the ship as that will just attract fire through the ship.

I'm thinking of having it deploy from the top, it means losing one of my pd hard points, but I'm not lacking in pd. Ship is crazy fast and handles like a Tasmanian devil on speed, might need to tweak the gyros.

[Husker_85]

One of the only vanilla PvP fights I ever took part of was me in a frigate with tons of gatling turrets, front rocket launchers, and layered armor. The other player was in a destroyer with two gravity guns and about half as many turrets as me.

He never managed to land a hit with those gravity guns, but despite that he eventually wore down and destroyed my ship. After the fight I took a look at his ship and there wasn't all that much damage. I couldn't figure out why my guns hadn't damaged his ship more until he told me that his gravity guns were throwing decoy blocks at me the whole time. So my gatling turrets had been shooting the projectiles the whole time instead of his ship.

[TheHellKat]

The MK2 variant is complete. I've switched all armour except for nose to light, I've attached a deployable decoy array on the top of the ship near the back with added redundancies.

I've also added 2 more mods in addition to the weapon mod, I've added the nanobot build and repair system (Bob) and a shield mod (not the bubble shield). I've only added in a very small amount of shielding, it will protect from a few gattling shots or 1 missile before failing.
This is done intentionally as I feel that shields can be somewhat OP.

I've reduced the cargo to a single small cargo container and a connector, it's a warship not a hauler. In addition to that I removed 2 gyroscopes, after some testing I felt that this gave enough control without feeling like it was out of control.

Lastly I increased the number of batteries so the jump drive will charge faster.

I'm kinda tired now so I'll upload it later today when I've got the pictures sorted.

[GHKtruc]

That grav gun with Decoy actually sounds like a pretty fun idea. I'm curious if there's any tutorials about decoy launchers

[TheHellKat]

Update about the progress of this ship and the related ships and station.

Skiff Command Ship - Finished
Zephyr Scout Ship - Finished
Hauler Cargo Ship - Finished (name tbc)
Mantis MK2 Patrol Ship - Finished
CHI HQ Station - Finished (needs painting)
Strike Alpha Fighter - Finished
Stixx Destroyer - technically finished but not happy.

That's the complete set, as you can see aside from a few finishing touches the set us finished except for the Stixx Destroyer. It came out as basically a large grid version of the Strike Fighter. I'm stumped for inspiration to rebuild it however so I'm taking a short break to play through the learn to survive.

I play this scenario to design ships with limited resources which makes me focus more on functionality over appearance and multi purpose.

So yeah, working on that scenario until I figure out what to do with the Stixx.
Also I'm taking suggestions for names for the hauler, some of the ship names have a basis in Greek mythology but that's not a requirement.

[BlueBronco1]

i eject small grid decoys out the side or top/bottom of my ship. Like a missile but does not go far from the ship do to a thruster the other way. Kind of like modern day flares they us on Fighter jets.

[BlueBronco1]

Names hmmmmmmmmmmm..........................

How bout the Transactor. Or the tesoract no clue how to spell it, but that thing from avengers.

Eagle
Hawk
Fiona
Lamp ray
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I know the SEA SQUIRT!!!!!