The Capital Ship Armor Thread

Well that is a pretty poor test.  I mean monolithic armor is pretty worthless at those velocities and no one uses that so a better test would be against armor with whipple shield and a complex composition armor.  So use stuffed whipple shields or spall liners and those types of things.

Well, if you've got 10m of Silica Aerogel (which actually does help a bit by making the warhead detonate further away), about 7m of Boron, 10m of Graphite Aerogel, 4m of VCS, and 10m of para-aramid fiber as a spall liner, you can get about an 80% stop rate against 1-megaton warheads.

It does reduce the amount of VCS you have to use, but increases your total armor thickness to 41m and is still prohibitively expensive.

A typical whipple shield (milimeter-range thickness) does absolutely nothing to incoming NEFPs, even stuffed, though you do still at least see the "warhead detonates further away" effect from the 20m+ of spacing.

The best part is that 10 meters of aerogel or any of the other things are ONLY cost prohibitive. Mass wise they are virtually free! So as long as you have an unlimited budget and give 0 shits about cross section you can end up with very light weight nigh impenetrable armor!

Also I would recommend testing with far more aerogel and a lot less other stuff.  The other stuff tends to heavily degrade the effectiveness of the whipple shield by adding more plasma to the impact.  So just using a crap load of aerogel or better yet microlattice with just some very thin like 1cm thick layers of basalt fiber has given me the best result.

I'm a little confused about the effectiveness of Whipple shields. In my stock weapon tests I've found that having the monolithic block works better than the Whipple! I tried the 3cm boron/1.4m aerogel/5mm boron arrangement but found it was better to reverse the matrix? Is this because of the 285mm coil gun isn't significantly effected by the Whipple? 

If I change the mono-block to 5cm van chrome (on an angled nose) the thing was practically invulnerable.

Hello, I am a new member, I just found out about the CoaDE yesterday and just started playing it today. Now I have not had time to read this whole thread but it reminded me of these images. They are from a Babylon 5 fan site but I wondered if you think either of these armor layouts are viable in CoaDE?

Link to source:efni.org/armor.htm

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Even an 80% defeat rate is not very good when you're dropping a budget of gigacreds though.  It just means all the enemy needs to do is spam even more missiles at you, if they drop a few Mcreds on missiles to kill 40+Gcreds worth of ship, that's quite a good trade for them.

Also, aerogel buffers are not mass-free if you have any hard shells outside them.  Because the larger radius will increase how much material you need for the outer shell.

NEFPs also make very large holes when they hit, so the aerogel buffer will crumble under sustained bombardment, and missiles are quite capable of flying through gaps in armor without getting destroyed (though I don't know if completely destroyed hull sections still count towards proximity, so the fuses might still go off in the same place).  One amusing thing with KKVs actually, if you have a large swarm of KKVs that have tons of delta-V to spare, the back end of the swarm can fly through the holes in the initial target after the swarm has bored through, turn around, and hit a secondary target.  It's an interesting side-effect of them not having fuses.

Anyway, my opinion is that armor is not the solution to NEFPs.  It's better to intercept them with something that can set off their prox fuses prematurely. The most armor can do is give you enough protection from direct-fire weapons that you can force the enemy into a missile duel, a missile duel you can hopefully be equipped to win.