Defense Modules

Defense comes in three forms: Armors, Shields, and Activated Defense Systems.

Titanium Armors provide a direct boost to hit points. Impact Armors, Thermal Armors and Energy Absorbers provides resistances to Kinetic, Heat and Energy damage resistances respectively. The resistance percentage is affected by the Hit Points and the Resistance Value. The resistance percentage is based on a ratio of Resistance Value and Hit Points. In addition, Impact Armor increases Ramming Damage while Energy Absorbers provide Energy Absorption and Thermal Armor slightly increases power regeneration. Reactive armor passively consumes power to provide more than twice the health per space of titanium armor. Patch 1.9 implemented Bionic Armor which in comparison to titanium armor has 1/8 of the hit points for 1/10 of the weight. The reason Bionic Armor is used is for its unlisted hit point regeneration bonus which can affect any ship type living or not.

Shield is a concept implemented in 0.12.4. It is passively recharged by the Shield Generators. It absorbs damage first before the armor. It is important to know that Shields don't benefit from resistance.

Frontal Energy Shield projects a force field in front of your ship which absorbs all incoming damage EXCEPT FOR explosive area-of-effect damage from Missiles and torpedoes; at least some of their damage will get through. Energy Shield projects a force field around your ship, which absorbs all incoming damage. They are powered by your ship's energy supply and drain more energy when being taxed by incoming fire. These Energy Shields are Activated Defense Systems.

Point-Defense System destroys incoming projectiles, but requires energy to function. It is an Activated Defense System. As of 0.17.6 it blows missiles and torpedoes up instead of disintegrating them.

The Cloaking System prevents incoming projectiles and AoE attacks from dealing damage to your ship by allowing it to pass through when activated, however enemies are still fully aware of where you are and guided projectiles will still follow you. It is an Activated Defense System and can be toggled on.

The Fortification module reduces any incoming damage with a type by changing resistance to take half of current damage. For example changing a 94% res into 97% (6% incoming damage becomes 3%), or 0% into 50%. It is an Activated Defense System; there's both a passive energy cost and a constant drain when active.

Resistance armor is 3x as strong as titanium but only blocks 1 damage type. Reactive armor is 2.5 times as strong as titanium, making it almost as good against all types as a single stacked resistance type.

Resistance builds benefit from energy absorption, ramming damage, minor energy regeneration but is near-useless against the rare no-type weapons.

Mixing resistance and normal armor will provide expected added effective health, just reduce the special benefits (and downside) of resistance. It can be useful to mix just one or two resistances with lots of normal armor.

Living ship regeneration and repair bot are % based healing so are equally good on either armor choice or mix. Repair ray and vampiric rays are based on fixed damage, and as such far stronger for resistance builds. Sometimes to the point of near immortality.

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