How does ship armor durability work? After shields go down, do all ship components have the same level of health, or does this vary? Can players adjust armor values at the price of weight and maneuverability?asked by Iliv7

Okay, so when the shields go down, ship components do not all have the same level of health. It depends on the ship and the components they have. So different items have different amounts of, whatever you want to call them, damage points that they can take. And different sections of the ship also have different damage points they can take. And if you have armor that's on that part, so you can have armored parts basically, then the armor becomes a modifier to the damage you can take. So if you've got heavy titanium armor on a wing, for instance, maybe that wing could take 100 damage points, but with the titanium armor it could take 200 before it's destroyed, kind of thing. So that's the way it is: armor is actually a plug-in item that just becomes a modifier for the damage that the part it's plugged into does, and it comes with its own weight. So when you plug in the armor, hopefully you'll see it visually and it'll get damaged as you hit it, but it will also bring in a certain amount of weight. So you could armor up your ship, but then you'll be adding weight to it, which means how it would fly and how it will handle won't be quite as good. If you put weight on the ships in Star Citizen, it will definitely not handle quite the same way. In fact, one way to check it out is to play the new Capture the Core game mode that we have, and you get the Core, which is a lot of weight, and try and fly around with that. Your ship doesn't handle the same way. And that's the advantage of having a properly physically simulated flight model where mass, inertia, thrust to power, acceleration all come into effect.