Leaky Armor Formula?

[Ed Kolis]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
If there is any surviving component with the armor ability on a ship, one of them will be hit.
70%-90% of the time, the ones with the fewest hitpoints first.

Ooh, I didn't even think of non-leaky armor... Do you have a relationship for that or is it all just trial data? My first guess would be an inverse relationship (a 10 HP armor would be twice as likely to be hit as a 20 HP armor) and my second would be something linear involving subtracting the hitpoints either from 65535 or 65536 to get the "target density"... any info on what tonnages of components you were comparing when you got the 70%-90% figure? Actually I'm surprised that it would be such a consistent probability; with the inverse relationship if you were comparing a 30 HP armor I with a 50 HP armor III you'd get a 1.67:1.00 ratio or 62%, whereas if you compared a 30 HP armor I with a 150 HP scattering armor you'd get a 5:1 ratio or 80%... hmm, I guess that IS about consistent... let's see, a 10 HP light armor vs. a 100 HP heavy armor is 10:1 or 91%, wow, that 70-90% figure is about right for the inverse relationship! (Whereas for the other one you'd get 65??6 vs. 65??6 which is pretty darn close to 1:1 or 50% no matter what hitpoints you use, and I've never seen a mod with a single armor comp with over 1000 hitpoints... well, OK, I think I did put some 250kT, 1280HP "ultra heavy armor" in my Xeo Mod but that doesn't count because no one ever played it
So that settles it, then, the chance for each "round" of an attack to hit a regular component is proportional to the component's Tonnage Structure, while the chance to hit a component with the Armor ability is (using Occam's razor) inversely proportional to the component's Tonnage Structure?
Hmm, if this isn't in the SE4 FAQ or the Modding FAQ, maybe it should be...

[Fyron]

There is info on leaky armor systems in SE4 MOdding 101 Tutorial. What more would you like to see included?

[Ed Kolis]

Just the fact that the chance to hit a particular non-armor-ability component first on any given shot is linearly proportional to the hitpoint, the chance to hit a particular armor-ability component first seems to be inversely proportional to the hitpoints, and that in most situations, armor components with fewer hitpoints will be hit first 70-90% of the time as SJ stated. Though I guess only the first item really applies to *leaky* armor