I looked up how many shield points a ship should be and it said that I should think of shields as roughly equal to armor and “using shields, you want the total shield strength to be at least as much as a single armor layer to get good results, more if feasible at your tech level”
The description of a shield generator tells you how many points it generates
No I mean how much is good for a ship size
Count how much armor your ship has. This is rows of armor (which you set) times columns (which is a function of how big the ship is). That’s how many “points” of armor you have.
I recommend around 30% as many shield points as armor points as a reasonable starting point. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve with that specific ship design though.
On a related topic, how much weaponry vs shield) armor to carry, ask yourself how long would it take your ship to kill itself, i.e. all shield points and about 2/3rd the armor? If the answer is less than say… a minute, you might need more shields and armor.
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If you need approximate numbers… Shields are ineffective on ships up to about 5kt. You can put a standard-sized shield on the 5kt. On something like 12kt, you can easily fit a maximum-size generator. At least two generators per 20kt.
But of course, this is only approximate. It all depends on the purpose of the ship and your combat doctrine - for example, for missile combat, armor is not so important, and shields are much more useful. Or you can create a maximum armored ship that will distract enemy fire on itself. Or alpha-strike gunship. Or you may want to just put up a little more/less shields than I indicated above. It’s up to you, play and have fun.
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I disagree about missile combat and shields. Shields are actually quite vulnerable to missiles since they take full damage. Meanwhile, armor protects you at sq root of damage for the point of impact.
Basically, a missile that does 16 damage will do take 16 points off your shield, but only penetrate 4 layers of armor.
Conversely, a shield is excellent protection against particle lances and lasers. These have deep penetration strikes to hit internals, but are generally lower damage values than a missile. At the same tech level you might be making 16 damage missiles, you might have a 6 damage particle lance or a 9 damage laser. These would penetrate armor deeply, but merely scratch a shield.
Your best defense against missiles are decoys or destroying them with PD fire and AMMs. Armor is an important back up here.
Your best defense against most beam weapons is shields.
Perhaps the best defense of all is staying out of their range while keeping them in range of your ships.
The layers do not give the armor any kind of “damage resistance”. Armor also takes full damage.
Shields can recharge between salvos. Armor can’t.
The armor also has “HP line”. Width×layers. In fact, the armor protects the ship less effectively, as it can pass some damage, which, for example, will cause to engine explosion. Shields never pass damage (except for Mesons) until they have HP. They just have less HP. But you can pierce armor with a large laser warhead missile, and you won’t have to destroy every armor cell.
Of course, decoys and PD are the best protection against missiles - but if you get hit by several, hitting the armor deprives you of some protection until repair. Hitting the shield has no effect unless the opponent can quickly attack you again.
You mentioned beam weapons, but you didn’t mention the Railgun and Plasma. The Railgun has good DPS with poor armor penetration. Plasma is literally a very cheap reusable missile warhead. Both of these weapons perform well against shields.
I also think it’s incorrect to compare the damage from a single missile salvo with the damage from a beam weapon salvo. They recharge much faster than missiles and have much higher DPS (except for Lances, obviously) - which works well against shields.
This is an absolutely critical point about the effectiveness of shields. Except for mesons, shields must be completely depleted before their protection fails, whereas armor need only be partially depleted before internal damage starts to occur. In practice, once a ship has lost about half of its armor, its overall structural integrity may be considered near-zero as most hits will deal internal damage.
For this reason, once shield tech advances high enough that shields provide about half as many HP per HS as armor, armor becomes almost useless unless the enemy is using mesons.
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This is nonsense. There is absolutely no reason to base some minimum shield size on the width of your armor.
My advice: design the largest shield generator you have the tech for. Put one of those on every full-size combat ship. Then add armor to your preferred depth. Then look at the relative cost/size of replacing some armor with additional shield generators.
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This is a rule of thumb, not a law of physics, but it is generally a good one.
The underlying idea is that if you cannot mount sufficient shields to provide similar protection to one layer of armor (without compromising the rest of your ship design), your shield tech level and/or design are not good enough to make shields useful. While this is only a rule of thumb it is useful for newer players who do not know much about how shields work.
You’ll have to explain to me why this is the case. There’s no intuitive relationship between the width of the armor belt and some minimum viable amount of shield points.
There isn’t a direct mathematical relationship. Like most rules of thumb, it is a convenient coincidence.
Consider a 10,000 ton (200 HS) ship with a corresponding armor width of 41 blocks. A basic Alpha-tech shield generator of 10 HS provides 10 shield points; two of these provides 20 shield points, so you are at that point investing 10% of your tonnage to provide half an armor layer’s worth of protection. That is a poor exchange.
If you double the shield strength (Gamma tech), then two 10-HS generators provide 40 shield points, which is close to the armor width. Coincidentally, Gamma tech tends to be the lowest tech level at which shields are considered useful by a sizable chunk of the player base. Many will argue that this is still not good enough, but very few would argue that anything lower-tech is very useful.
Of course, at Gamma tech the individual shield generators can be larger. A single 15-HS generator provides 37 shield points IIRC, which is close to a full armor layer for only 7.5% of displacement.
Even better, at Delta tech you can build a 20-HS generator that provides 71 shield points, well over a single layer of protection for 10% of displacement. Coincidentally, most players will consider Delta tech to be useful (I’m not sure I’ve seen an opinion to the contrary, but I’m sure it exists). For higher tech levels, the rule of thumb breaks down, but that’s fine because at higher tech levels the shield technology is clearly good enough. The rule of thumb is really only necessary for early tech levels to help an inexperienced player make a reasonable guess as to when shields are useful.
Ultimately, it is a rule of thumb only and not an immutable law, just like “make 40% of your displacement engines to get a good speed”. There are also of course silly exceptions, like making a ship 50% shield by displacement (that would “pass” the rule but the ship would be useless). Of course, the best method is to learn the mathematical rules and do the analysis yourself to determine the best approach, but new players can use these rules of thumb while learning the complexities of Aurora by degrees (and some experienced players still don’t want to learn much math, so such guidelines are useful for them as well).
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But why is that a poor exchange? Does it not matter what you are paying for that armor (relative to what you are paying for the shields)?
And if you are faster you can pull back, recharge, then go back in.
Very useful against raider ships that only have armour, where you may only have 1 - 5 or so colony guard ships.
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It’s a poor exchange in a stand up fight where you could, instead, have a lot more armor for the same cost.
Obviously there are situations where having even a a small number of points of shield is very helpful, e.g. dealing with an enemy beam ship that outranges you but deals only small damage at that range, missiles that leak through your point defense, etc, because shields recharge without needing to go back to a shipyard for repair.
All that said, I start including AT LEAST one max size shield generator in most of my combat ships once I hit Delta shield tech. The ability to recharge is super helpful when your ships are on offense away from a shipyard, shields protect from HPM, shields prevent shock damage, shields protect against deep penetration weapons (particle lances and lasers) better, etc.
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I’m asking why, specifically, is 10% of tonnage for half of an armor’s width of shield points a bad exchange.
Your answer is…that it’s a poor exchange in this situation because it could have been armor instead.
But that doesn’t answer why. Why is 10% of tonnage for half an armor’s width bad?
Is 10% for a full width good?
10% for two widths?
Because an extra layer of armor would probably only add ~1% more tonnage, whereas a shield is, in this hypothetical situation, adding 10% more tonnage for less or equal benefit.
How do you know that?
Doesn’t that depend quite a bit on tech level?
Just eyeballing my mid-game designs, it seems that extra layers cost at least 1.5%.
But why is 10% for half an armor layer bad?
Is there some point at high tech levels that shields ever aren’t adding more tonnage and cost per point than armor?
Don’t shields always offer the same tradeoff?
You get three benefits in exchange for being more tonnage and cost per point.
First benefit is you have to destroy all the shield points before doing damage to anything else.
Armor, obviously, starts allowing internal damage well before all the armor has been destroyed.
Second benefit is you don’t have to repair shield damage between battles.
Armor damage needs to be repaired at a yard (takes quite a bit of time) or in a hangar (takes quite a bit of MSP; not to mention hangar capacity itself is not cheap).
Third benefit is that shields recharge during battle. How much that matters depends a lot on the length and texture of the battle. But it means that shields provide more actual protection than nominal protection. Armor is simple WYSIWYG for a single battle.
So why is it that “if you cannot mount sufficient shields to provide similar protection to one layer of armor” then you shouldn’t use shields? What is so magical about 1 layer of armor?
(Besides, what is ever preventing you from mounting enough shields to equal one armor layer? You can always add multiple generators.)
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I’d add the fourth benefit that shields can be surprisingly cheap compared to equivalent tonnage of armour and also use Corbomite instead of Duranium, which is usually in less demand elsewhere.
This also makes them relatively refittable.
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