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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8082792" data-attributes="member: 16814">The assumption of high V  for projectiles isn't terribly warranted.  Yes, compared to an outside reference point, everything is often moving at tremendous velocities, but that's not the important number -- it's the projectiles velocity relative to the target's.  You can generate very high V's, but that's actually going to make your chance of hitting pretty bad if the target is at all aware of you and evading.  High V is still pretty slow, so unless you're close (at which point your V compared to the target is big, which is where you're getting the high-V of the round, most likely resulting in crazy small shot windows) your chance to predict is also very low.  If you're positing that ships will have the power available to hyper-accelerate the rounds, sure, could work, still need to be close to reduce the prediction volume for an evading target, but then you also have a lot of power lying around so some extra armor for those hits that are glancing and where it would help isn't a huge cost.  Large, high-V projectile weapons would be very good against fixed targets, but not so much against mobile ones -- at least those mobile ones that know they're being attacked.Missiles would have similar problems, except that you'd have to be able to put the power onboard the missile to accelerate it to high-V.  Without the high V, armor against missile attacks becomes a lot more attractive.  You can't outmaneuver a much lower mass object with that much available dV, so you have to figure out how to kill it on the way to you or survive impact, and armor's good for the latter.  If, on the other hand, you postulate that the missiles can boost to high-V, then you're still dealing with massive available power for the ships as well (more so, due to size), so armor mass isn't very limiting and you can carry some for the edge cases.  Mostly, though, you'll be loading hordes of counters.  Missile flight paths will be much more predictable because you already know where the final point of contact is, so your firing solutions on even nimble missiles is much easier.  Plus, you'll be closer so you can use your own counter-missiles or point defense flak to blanket useful areas.   Honor Harrington's universe runs according to these rules, only missiles there are just vehicles for getting single use energy weapons close enough without risking ships.  Largely because of the prediction ease for point defense for impact missiles and secondly because, even though HH torpedos are moving super fast, contact is very, very hard against even huge battleships in space.What armor would be very good against is beam or energy weaponry.  Here, armor is the name of the game.  The ability to ablate incoming energy would be critical to survival in an engagement with energy weapons.  Armor is very important here, and probably worth the cost in extra mass.So, armor may be counter-indicated depending on the exact nature of these things in your setting (see the Expanse for a good example), but may be very useful still (see Honor Harrington books, where energy weapons dominate, even on torpedoes).  I don't think you can just rule it out as you've done.  Armor is going to be very dependent the threat environment and your power envelop, but it would still be useful in a lot of cases.</blockquote>

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