Shielding concept

[Simon_Jester]

They were not running into each other. It was deliberate.
The logic of both sides was that it is more important to avoid being hit than to hit the enemy.

Given that both sides' ships are so heavily armored as to be practically immune to enemy fire, I think that's not a very wise calculation to make. If I ignore trying to intercept your shells and just bore through your own counterbattery fire, I'm going to be scoring hits while you're still spraying shells in hopes of intercepting them all. And I'll probably be expending less ammunition than you, because you'll need to fire more than one missile to be guaranteed of intercepting one of my missiles.

Especially when you are mindlessly insisting on using your own main battery missiles to intercept enemy main battery missiles on a one for one basis when any sane naval designer would be using lighter point defense weapons or cluster-missile shells capable of getting multiple interceptions from the same shell.

Nah, it just means the whole lot of you are bleeding idiots. A small shell that does a little damage if it hits is worth much, much less than a bigger shell that does a lot of damage if it hits. Especially since the big shell has a better shot at getting a piece of something that would mission-kill, or kill-kill, an opposing ship.

But less shells means that less get through. If only 10% of the projectiles gets through, and you fire 10 projectiles than 1 will hit. If you fire 1 with the firepower of all 10 combined than 0 will hit.

What if you fire 100 of the lighter shells and 10 of the heavier? Ten lighter shells get through and make ten comical little pockmarcks in the enemy's armor belt. One heavy shell gets through and kicks an enemy battleship's guts out, because increasing firepower by a factor of ten over the minimum needed to breach the armor massively increases effect against armored targets.

A ship that can barely be damaged by 6" shell fire will suffer very heavy damage when hit by 12" shell fire.

Again, this entire design philosophy seems to involve building the equivalent of pre-dreadnought battleships armed with a uniform 5" battery, jerking off about how you can shoot enemy shells out of the air with them, and then spraying about ten thousand rounds in the general direction of the enemy and praying that a few of them manage to mildly inconvenience their target. It doesn't add up.

[Patrick Degan]

You don't necessarily have to armor the whole surface area of the small ships, either. Imagine a ship with just one armored side, let's call it FRONT TOWARD ENEMY for laughs, and the other five sides have other shit. (guns, engines, lighter armor, whatever)

Now, take that swarm and have it build a virtual super-ship on demand. To do that, they take up a formation with FRONT TOWARD ENEMY pointing wherever you need armor. Your other sides are undefended, but you can trust your fleet buddies to cover it for you.

Now, if you lose a section of armor, you just rotate the damaged ship out of formation and put a fresh one in to plug the hole. A ship runs out of ammo? Rotate it out into armor duty or something. If the enemy moves and you don't need to armor one side, you can re-organize your fleet to any new geometry for maximum killing.


It is like an ancient army standing with their shields together, but in 3d spaaaaaace.

This conjures in my mind an image of toadstool-shaped ships, with the weapons arranged in circular clusters on the armoured forward surface.