Time Stamps: 0:00 - Ze Beginning 0:45 - Ze Basic Armour Formula 2:12 - Structural Block Overview 3:12 - Intermission: A Very Brief Note on ERA 3:52 - 'True' Structural Material Rundown 15:10 - 'False' Structural Material Rundown 21:57 - Structural Efficiency Formula Explanation 23:00 - Ze Structural Efficiency Formula 24:03 - Intermission: Bonus Beam Health 25:08 - Structural Efficiency Rankings 27:46 - Intermission: The Goshawk and Other Flying Bricks 31:14 - Intermission: Stone & HA Compartments 35:18 - Intermission: A Very Brief Note on Metal/Alloy Plates 36:49 - Full Structural Efficiency Rankings! 38:34 - Air Makes Good Armour! 42:17 - Air Gaps and HEAT Shells 48:40 - A Brief Note On HESH 49:30 - Sloped Armour! 51:27 - Slope Damage Reduction Formula 54:27 - Limits of Slopes

2:04 Ah, rail juice, the only juice you should have for a balanced FtD breakfast.

I hate-love this game, because as soon as I get my vehicle done, I learn there's a 10x better way of doing what I engineered it to do.

You tubers: Wood and metal are good because they are material efficient. Me: Hehe, Lightweight alloy and Heavy armour go *CLANG*

It is so during to hear someone say "f you're not seeing this in 2021 then greetings from the past" Insinuating that we live past this year

Due to a foul up involving a laptop and a time machine, I am watching this in the year 1892. Please send help.

A small suggestion for your formula: rather than using absolute values, use relative values. What I mean by that is rather then taking for instance just the health value, you take the health of a block and dived it by the health value of heavy armor (biggest number). This way you get a number between 0 and 1 for every category. In your current formula health is weighed a lot heavier than for instance weight because the numbers go higher. This correction gives you the benefit of weighing high health the same as low weight. So you would substitute just the health by: (Health/Health_heavy_armor) and do the same for the other factors in you equation. You could even add a correction factor to every value again for instance you might think EMP drainage is particularly important and multiply it by 1,2 to reflect that. Al together for health that would look like: (Health*Correction_factor/Health_heavy_armor). If you include it in you equation it might allow you to generate a number that better reflects you feelings on the blocks (not perfectly of course). Anyway, can you tell I like numbers?

Borderwise: Sinking is bad for a ship. Lathix: **laughs in Oathbreaker** (for those wondering, its his modified paladin from an adventure run recently. he set it up so that it sinks when he reverses. It has harpoons on it, so he used it to drag a scarlet dawn flier under water while blasting it with a bow-mounted PAC when it tried to resist).

Literally woke up after an intense play-session yesterday. Relizing I had to improve upon my armour designs I began searching the internet. I found an article on the steam workshop. Managed to read half of it before relizing that BorderWise, literally 10 min earlier, posted a video on the exact matter. Great video! Keep up the good work, it means a lot to the community, especially us new players. Thanks!

I don't even learn that much from your tutorials, but setting out to explain the basics with easy to understand examples is a major service to our small community, so I watch and like them all. Maybe it wouldn't have been so small with decent documentation earlier on, I know it almost put me off several times, perhaps worse than the old ugly and dysfunctional UI. It's sad to have most game mechanics largely undocumented apart from your videos and Steam/Reddit, as the wiki is often years out of date and the in-game documentation is lackluster. I really love all the recent changes and I think the game is finally maturing somewhat, but I don't understand how Brilliant Skies intend to convince more people to join who haven't had the chance to familiarize with features as they were introduced. No one should ever need to browse through the entire changelog of a game they purchased in order to understand it. There should perhaps be a way for players to contribute to the in-game tutorials in order to provide much needed real examples to new players, rather than just which part does what on its own, and a clear explanation of scaling effects for various systems, which has been some of the most evasive info to find up-to-date in my experience. I believe they would do right to reach out to the community and organize something to make it so as little alt-tabbing as possible is required. As the game features stabilize, I hope this is what they focus their efforts on.

30:00 I say appliqué because I'm french and "appliqué" means "applied" or in this case "slapped on" which makes sense to me but it's up to you ngl

Slopes greatly reduce kinetic dmg cause of the formula, but tend to have less health than equivalent beams. So putting beams on spinblocks and angling them slightly now lets you take advantage of slopes vs kinetic shells while still having the HP to back it up.

Sinking is bad for ships? Wut? That's news.

WHO ASKED... but we all need this info either way

Your videos are my key to peeling back the layers of this game. Dear, god.

pog time to update my cruiser again

Tank Nerds! I really think it's amazing how well the Devs have implemented armor similar to its real-life properties, it makes the game really unique for that reason.

Re-request for an Iowa-like ship #1

I just discovered the goshawk a few hours before this was uploaded lol. Kicked my ass in designer

You say ERA is useless, and as armor I pretty much agree. I use ERA to negate damage from my own internal explosions on compact designs. Preventing damage from your own exploding HE APS can often help keep you alive.

:3 was wondering about this, all the guides on steam are outdated. thx :)

Thamk, was looking for an updated version yesterday, also are you south african? Very familiar accent

I use truss blocks to hang beams on the side of my ship down into the water. I then use the truss blocks to stick out a few blocks underwater then stick on some thin metal panels. Sense they are mostly empty space it adds little drag to the ship. Then if any torpedoes make it past your anti torpedo measures they hit those panels and explode a few meters away from your hull. Its one time tell repaired again but its can really make the difference even against fairly beefy torpedoes.

Hi Borderwise, watching this video actually gave me a video idea for you: I don't know if you have built this before, but how about a very large wooden ship with very strong ring shields and lots of turrets and engines. The idea behind this is that the armor class of wood is it's biggest downfall, so using ring shields which give a flat armor bonus will disproportionately benefit wood (protect it against explosions) and with wood being as cheap as it is, you can spam VERY thick wooden armor.(largely Immune to emp, explosions and heat/hesh will become useless with the armors thickness/many airgaps.) The only weakness is that large kinetic rounds will still poke holes through the ship, so to counter that we will use redundancy, hence the many turrets(APS with ejectors or preferably crams for safety and price efficiency, maybe a bit of heavy armor to protect the most critical areas) and many engines (to power the ring shields) and ring shields spread throughout the ship (to prevent losing most of your armor bonus in one go). For the same reasons multiple AI mainframes. This should yield a ship with very high survivability (can't sink and hard to destroy)and firepower for it's price.

Thanks, very useful! Little tip: you can set your ACB to "interaction" that way they trigger if you press Q on them, so you dont have to go into the menu and press test. Not a big difference but convenient

Something I discovered once that you left out about truss blocks: They are as see through as glass. Cameras, retroreflector sensors rangefinder etc can see through truss blocks. Makes for some interesting connections of light crafts or superstructures.

Empty space makes good armor in real life as well. For HEAT it just gives space for the metal stream to dissapate but it also finds use against kinetic munitions. Quite a few tanks will have a sharply angled initial armor plate then an air gap. The air gap is supposed to give room for the kinetic munition to tumble after passing through the first armor plate so it hits the actual armor at a weird angle and shatters

Cool I needed a thing like this for lazy so thanks

Truss blocks, if in an enclosed section, can also count most of their space to helium and air pumps, allowing for your air gap/buoyancy/lift rooms to have hp and armor. I use them on my airships and in the sides of most of my heavier hulls. It is a buoyant block with 30 armor that also gives 80% of its volume^3 to pumps...

I use reinforced decking for my decks but I use it upside down because I like the look of it more than the other blocks

use the q context menu on the vehicle (hold q) and select the repair all function restores the health of every single block

49:35 Your podcasting *_Tankious Nerdious_* is at your service

When you mentioned that metal plates were pretty much decoration I had a thought of use for them, Im pretty new but I know you can set depth charges in some projectiles. My idea is that you could have metal plate sheets a few meters from your main hull to be used to trick depth charges in exploding outside of your hull because it will have gone through the paper metal plates and activated early before it hits through your main hull!

Heres a q about armour stacking. You decide you are going to have 3m of armour over your belt, 1m of wood, 1m of metal, 1m of HA (this is fixed, we are not discussing this). Which is the best way round to put them? I usually would put the HA on the inside and the wood on the outside, as the HA will them be passing its huge stacking bonus to both the metal and wood, as well as being a very tough last line of defence - in addition it is cheaper to repair as most of the penetrating damage will be taken by the wood/metal. However, I have heard people say put the wood on the inside and the HA on the business end - that way you push the already high AC value of HA even higher, but the disadvantage is if your 'egg is cracked' you are pretty much made of tin, plus every block the enemy actually manage to destroy will be an expensive HA block that your bots/tentacles/avatar has to replace....

Also there was an update awhile back that updated hit detection, so HEAT and HESH can sometimes pass through poles because the game decided part of the pole is touching the other structural blocks. But i havent played in awhile so that mightve changed as well too.

So... have I got a weird thought for you. I was doing some airship experimentation and discovered that Truss Blocks are treated as 'air' for some purposes. I created a balloon and replaced the empty space with truss blocks, and it stayed in the air, confirming the game treated it as 'air' for some purposes. And that led me to thinking.... what about using it as an air gap in spaced armour? Initial tests are suggesting that it does consider it "air" for the purposes of heat and hesh. (caveat: i'm very tired and my test setup is very hokey) That said, it's not structural, so the only use-case I can think of using it in armour would be as a lower-weight alternative to applique panels air-gaps...

On the topic of plates, alloy plates can be very useful. I recently made a stealth tank and in order to reduce its radar visibility I covered it in alloy plates. It works great.

The problem your calculations are running into with heavy armor is that it has no distance buffer because it's really thin. An explosion takes place directly next to 5 metal blocks. Even by the third or forth block, that damage is highly degraded because of the distance from the explosion. Meanwhile, heavy armor is so condensed that it takes the full force of the explosion. Stone overperforms because it's the opposite of heavy armor. It's cheap and gives very thick buffer that degrades a lot of weapons, rather than taking the full damage.

A comment about armored poles as HEAT defense - I've found in my own testing that this is inconsistent - sometimes a HEAT shell will pass right through the pole and generate their frags on the other side. It works most of the time, but it is definitely necessary to have an extra layer of armor behind to catch the frags.

7:00 there is a famous ship where I live a man just decided to make a concrete ship. Hooked up engines and ran it for around 3 years but it had engine troubles or sprung a leak. So he beached it, and removing fuel tanks and engines. Now its a cool ufo looking think to check put

Since you didn't mention it, I will note that 4m offset pieces are actually 5m long and benefit from a rare +25% HP bonus while being as sloped as a 4m slope and just a good outside hull building block. I think your structural efficiency formula could some tweaking. As low AC (40) extremely costly to achieve through most offensive means, it may be more representative to make the AC variable exponential (²) instead of linear. On the topic of stone, I've been following Menti's last tournament and it seems like the relatively low AC of stone nowadays is really hurting it quite badly as a general shipbuilding material. Still the top choice for AI's EMP-proofing shell, though. You purposefully avoided discussing HESH in this video so that may be something you intend to cover, but as spall-lining is most effective with the lowest last block AC possible followed by the highest possible, ERA (which is structural) could perhaps work counter-intuitively as an internal spall-liner stuck onto HA poles. I've yet to try it out in practice so this is speculation, but it seems like it could make it not entirely pointless despite its weakness to FtD's plentiful explosions? I feel like metal plating still deserves a mention beyond aesthetics, as despite its low AC it can be quite useful to cheaply increase the outer AC of a ship built mostly out of wood. Its weakness makes it ablative at best for sure, but it does somewhat prevent explosions from digging as deep into the armour. Also works wonders as an ugly, cheap, low drag torpedo barrier. "guilty lead" hehehe. It sure has seen better days, but hey I'm glad there's a cheap way to balance my overweight and somewhat HESH/HEAT-proof turret caps. (edit: posted the comment with the notes I took, removed them)

I am watching this in 2019! Judging by how this guy sounds it seems that 2020 will be good!

Greetings from the future

41:06 You can actually use the 'q' menu in designer to fully repair it instead

Thanks BorderWise! This answers a lot of the difficulties I was having in terms of armoring my vehicles - simply, I'm building too small, and there's not enough air gaps so the dreadfully common HE damage tears me apart... Knowing the trick with poles is very useful, and I don't think I would have ever thought to test that on my own. I also think that I need to go test HESH and HEAT now so that I can understand my favorite APS better. A question I have: in terms of sloped armor, do applique panel slopes get even more of a damage reduction against kinetic because they have half the height and correspondingly a steeper angle? I've noticed that those can be strangely tanky when I use them to make nice slope transitions on my builds. One last question: for armoring, what orientation of the armor blocks do you think is best? I was doing it in such a fashion that the first layer went one way and every layer after switched orientation so that hull breaches would hopefully be as small as possible, but after finding out that a beam stacks with itself I wonder if having the beam facing straight out would be better.

Just what I needed. Didn’t realize I had to get a degree in order the enjoy this game

I'm watching from 2023! And I just subbed! 🙂

Actual question: Does the slope damage formula also apply if you hit flat armor from an angle besides perpendicular?

I use the alloy and metal plates to defend exposed parts on the tripod masts I make for detection and AA. The only other use I can find is for absorbing light explosive damage and, as you said, decoration.

Applique and trusses would make great spaced armor to counter heat and hesh rounds

I had a quick test and 2k HE dmg stops doing dmg past 3 or 4 meters to say an engine radiator, in empty space. So empty space reduces HE dmg by a tremendous amount. And that basically answers when to use frag or HE in APS shells; frag if theres lots of empty space, HE if theres lots of things tightly packed with each other.

Borderwise, how about starting a series of ftd mythbuster videos? Like, "ERA block can stop a huge missile HEAT"

After watching this I am going to go reconsider all my armour choices

"If you are watching this from a year other than 2021, greetings from the past or future.

Friendly tip for dealing with the hawk is massed emp partical cannons

you would think that hollow point shells would shatter or deflect on slopes

I tend to make my ships entirely out of alloy (barring strategic heavy armor reinforcing here and there), especially since they made it the same cost as metal. Slightly less health and armor than metal, but it makes building lightweight/speedy/buoyant craft very easy. I used to be more sparing with it when it was a pricey material, but it's a no brainer now. Alloy spam is the way.

I just wish that all the blocks had all shapes. I really would like to have more options for applique, era, and reinforced wood. The applique esp, since it looks good on aircraft. As it stands we have to mimic blocks to get corners on the applique or era since they are half height. Good vid!

5:26 the word your looking for is nullified.

YAY it has arrived

Helped a lot, thanks!

Great update, needed this.

I have come from the future to say that rubber now has twice the EMP resistance of wood

To be that guy, if you look at naval armor schemes, you'll notice they also use sloped armor. But internally wrather, around the citadel of the vehicle.

spaced armor is a real thing and it is quite good

Now I really want to try this game. Too bad there is no ceramic or uranium armor, but I guess heavy armor could be uranium armor in disguise.

The value of rubber cannot be overstated in low-flying hovercraft. Coating the bottom of a Scarlet Dawn style hovership in rubber can be more valuable than using that space for additional turrets.

It's very odd that slopes don't work against HEAT, though in real life it increases the effective thickness of the armor. Another thing to point out is that HEAT in real life is a bit different than the game, so anyone who wants to go in depth with how HEAT works, there are a few simulations on KZfaq that accurately display what happens.

You should put this video in a new playlist for up to date tutorials

Can you do a most wanted for the goshawk

This is quite good to know thank you, I only wish there was more modded blocks, I want a bronze ship dammit.

I don't know why everyone feel Goshawk hard to kill. I kill it with my 800k material thrustercraft and it only lose 1% of block in process... The most dangerous GT craft for me is Aquila.

*British people in the background making an aircraft carrier out of ice*

Spaced armor is a thing. Air makes fantastic armor against HEAT warheads. It only doesn't make sense if one doesn't know how armor actually works irl

Could you please do a video on advanced cannon tetris

Fun fact: somehow I managed to forget armor stacking for my ships after my first ship and wondered why it was so effective, yeah defence isn't my strongest skill.

Do hesh shells still spawn fragments in wooden armor?

I use rubber to encase my Ai as it has a higher EMP reduction and lower weight than stone

Could you go in depth into heat, hesh, and era. I couldn't figure those out. Also to sum up detection for you if you want to add it. Relatively, most blocks are 3, rubber is 1, light alloy is 2, metal is 5, heavy armor is 7 or 8, detection components are ridiculously high.

So would it not be accurate to say: heavy armor while ideally used sparingly gets it's place in third because when used properly it has a very big benefit? Also I feel you're selling the plates a biiit short borderwise, from personal experience they're actually quite functional as regenerative ablative armor, as their lower cost and single block nature does seem to make it easier for repairs bot/tentacles to keep up with the damage in combat

I would like to mention operation mulberry Making a bunch of massive concrete blocks into mobile harbors to make a massive mobile harbor to support the invasion of Normandy

There is a secret 3rd use for rubber; as an inside lining against hesh shells....

The Goshawk looks exactly like the Silvana from Last Exile...

The only use I can see for ERA is for land vehicles like tanks. Even then, it’s not very applicable because sloped armor exists.

From the depths is like stormworks if the devs actually cared

really need to build a 1 to 1 USS Atlanta.

Noice voice crack 00:01

you really have more intermissions then acutal video nice job

Shell deflection what makes them bounce off armour

Yes

Can you break down Stealth

I’m literally watching this in 2020

Question, is kinetic damage reduced if it hits a beam at an angle or is it exlusive only to slopes?

I made an account just to comment on your video. ;)

Btw according to some very smart people on discord heat and hesh pass through applique panels

Borderwise, does applique paneling get armor stacking from armor blocks behind it? I understand that they do not give armor stacking, but are they able to receive it?

Strange thing I’ve found about HA: It’s normally impractical but actually really useful for larger broadsiders and frontsiders such as the Aquila, impedance, and the Hypernova The armor stacking it provides as a last line of armor really helps Edit: Can’t forget the HA wood/Ascaridole as well Double edit: I made this comment before getting to 27:55

Sloped armour? Pffft, view ports are the ultimate armour, wait, this is war thunder right?

what determines if a shell penetrates armor? you covered damage values very well, but I am still a bit confused on when or if a warhead goes through a block without destroying it. Does the AP have to equal or exceed to AC?

Doesn't stone just reduce EMP damage that goes through it, not make something EMP proof?