Armor Design Intentions

The rationale for why Armor is balanced and designed the way it is.

Plate Armor

The basic armor type most others are balanced against. It represents a big block of HP, a little damage resistance, and is supposed to be easy/quick to build, not very expensive, but heavy.

Superstructure

Was originally going to be just a sort of "nothing" hex, with the HP of a subsystem hex but no actual subsystem, very cheap, very light, just a little bit of damage resist, when you didn't want a hole in your ship.... but apparently it's powered armor-lite now.

Ablative Armor

Lighter than Plate, because (I don't know the because, but it should have one), resists small hits to make (fill in) result in game.

Reactive Armor

Supposed to be good against missiles etc, what are the tradeoffs compared to plate and WHY did we choose those tradeoffs?

Quantum Armor

Phase-shifted neutronium, with most of the HP and damage resist but without the mass cost. Intended to enable a very high HP quick moving vessel? Balanced by high labor cost to ensure they're a long term investment, and the loss of such a vessel should prevent it reoccurring? Maint. cost on armor hexes prevents building up a large reserve of these ships without a huge economic advantage.

Ceramic Armor (proposed)

Defense against lasers because they're still pretty good. New and interesting DefaultUnlock tech, because people like toys to play with. New ship design wrinkles to consider. Ceramic armor has a low to moderate damage resist (slightly higher than plate, but lower than ablative) against most weapons, significantly higher than that against energy weapons (x3? x4?), but cannot be replaced.
I'm unsure whether it should be repairable or not, but I'm leaning towards yes it can be repaired as normal but no it cannot be replaced without a retrofit like crystal armor. -- Darloth It's light, it's money-cheap to produce, but somewhat labor intensive and given that after every major battle you'll need to refit the ships and re-spend that labor (plus micromanagement player-attention cost of doing so) will make this an excellent armor for things you don't expect to face combat that often, or ships built up before a war that you do not expect to survive. Simulationistically speaking, it should also have an element of Reactive armor to it as well, where the cracking of the plates diffuses further damage (perhaps cap damage to, say, 120% of the hp of a given hex, if that's workable. If not, put the cap in as 100% so things can destroy it in one hit but not penetrate much past that without actual armor penetration). I am unsure if that would make it overpowered but I don't believe so if it takes long enough to refit onto everything.