Intermediate Guide to Tanking by Friedrick Psitalon
Making Life Easy On Your Tank – Resistances to Damage
Shields and armour both have a natural base resistance to damage:
Shields: 0% vs EM, 60% vs Explosive, 40% Kinetic, 20% Thermal.
Armour: 60% vs EM, 10% Explosive, 35% Kinetic, 35% Thermal.
The way this resistance works is very simple: if you were to take 100 points of explosive damage and your shields were still up (they have not already been destroyed), your shields would ignore 60 of those 100 points; only 40 would actually be applied to your shield total. If those 100 points were Electro Magnetic, however, your shields would not ignore any of the damage, and all 100 would be applied to your total remaining shields!
Similarly, armour has a strong suit – EM does little to harm it – and a weak suit – explosives do nearly full damage. The question that quickly arises to any intelligent player then: “What can I do to increase my resistance to X in my shields/armour?” Resistance upgrades go by several different names, depending on if they are armour or shield units, and passive or active in nature. A passive resistance module never needs to be turned on, and uses no capacitor, but usually uses a little power grid. An active resistance module uses no grid, but does actually need to be activated, and once you do activate it, your capacitor will begin to experience some drain. The benefit of an active resistance module, though, is that it tends to do a great deal more for your defences.
Passive shield resistance modules are called “Shield Resistance Amplifiers,” while passive armour resistance modules are either “Membranes” or “Plating” depending on which variety you choose. Active shield and armour resistance modules both go by the same name: “Hardeners.”
Why should I use a resistance module when I can just slap on another extender/armour plate?
Two reasons: first, extenders and armour plates tend to be quite hard on the grid and CPU, and in the case of armour plates, they also add to the total weight of the ship – slower, clumsier ships get hit more often! Secondly, many times, a resistance module actually adds more to the “true” hit point total of the ship than another armour plate would.
A ship with 3000 shield points actually has four different shield hit point totals. Since shields have no natural resistance to EM, the ship’s EM hit point total is exactly what it starts with: 3000. Shields have a 60% resistance to explosive damage; 60% of all explosive damage is ignored. Thus, to do 3000 points of explosive damage to a ship, you would actually have to do a great deal more. When 3000 explosive damage is applied, only 40% of that - 1200 gets through. You would have to do 7500 points of explosive damage to actually breach a 3000 point shield! Shocked A 3000 shield ship can actually withstand almost eight thousand points of explosive damage before the shield is defeated!
Using this knowledge, then, it is not always better to add an extender or an armour plate. A ship with 1000 shields/armour that added 100 more shields/armour is only adding another 100 points of total resistance, or 10% more “true” hit points. If, instead, the player added a kinetic resistance module that granted 50% (which most actives do) the ship would have a “true” hit point total of a great deal more. p>
Why shouldn’t I just use two kinetic hardeners? Then I’m immune to all kinetic damage, right? 100% added to my base 35, woo!
Not quite. When you add 50% resistance, it doesn’t actually stack perfectly with your base resistance. A 50% resistance hardener takes the amount of damage you would normally have taken after your ship’s base resistance (40 or 35, depending on shields/armour) and then cuts that damage by 50%. Another 50% hardener takes the total after the first hardener, and cuts that by 50% - effectively adding another 25% to your “true” resistance. (Half your damage removed, and then half of your half remaining.)
More modules are never bad, but in terms of “true” hit points added, you get the most defence by adding hardeners where you are weakest. 50% hardener to your shield EM resistance (base of 0) really does cut all incoming EM damage in half. 50% hardener to your armour EM, though, only cuts in half the damage that gets by your armour’s base level of 60%... half of the remaining 40% of damage, basically. There is also a penalty for stacking multiple modules of the same type of resistance – diminishing returns exist. Sparing the reader the painful math, the “best” number of a module that stacks you can use is three – more than that and the stacking penalties become brutal enough that nearly anything would probably be more useful.
