With the physical damage model, the strength of the ship's armor will be defined by material and thickness. Are special materials for military and civilian armors planned, and will we be able to change the armor of our ships?
TL;DRThere will be different armor materials for military and civilian ships, but the first physical damage release won't let players swap armor, and whether that changes later is still debated internally.
That's a few questions in one there. Yes, there will be different materials for military and civilian ships. And we can even go down to the granularity of: this variant of the ship has a slightly hardened material that gives it some improved properties. In the first version of the physical damage rollout, we would not be letting you swap these things out. Whether we change that in the future, that's up for debate internally. But it's going to be such an apocalyptic change to how the game plays when that comes in. As people have predicted, and as we've talked about, all the existing meta for combat and damage and gameplay will be null and void with it, because you'll be moving away from this DPS race of just decreasing a thousand hit points to zero and winning, to targeting specific areas and disabling ships and doing something with those disabled ships.
If you think about the sports car analogy, you can get a Porsche that is all aluminium or all metal, and then you get the top version, the GT3 or whatever, that is completely stripped back and it's got carbon fibre body panels and a carbon roof or whatever it might be. And I guess that's a similar approach we may or may not take to some of our ships.