What's the current status of ship armor?

So, all ships have an armor item. It doesn't behave how the long-term vision for armor is. At the moment, it's very simplistic: an incoming damage reduction modifier. It could be increasing if we really wanted to, but that's not really armor. So it really just scales down different damage types coming in to give that pseudo armor behavior. In the future, we're going to have the physically based damage system. So that will essentially be a layer on top of that that determines how the projectiles interact with the actual hull of the ship. Between now and then there's things we're looking at doing in terms of it not just being a flat modifier but having its own, not health pool, but its own properties. At the moment in game you can go up to a spaceship with a pistol, and if you had infinite ammo you could kill an Idris by just tapping away with a ballistic pistol, which makes no sense, whereas we want to have minimum thresholds, which is what physically based damage would do for us out of the box. It would go, this projectile is doing X amount of joules of energy, that's less than I care about, so it will just bounce off. Whereas with the current system, we'd need to go, this projectile is coming and doing 45 damage, we only care about damage that is above 90 before it starts chipping away into health.

You don't want armor to be just more health, right? You want it to be different mechanics.

Being more health is not interesting gameplay. The same as shield health being just an extra health isn't particularly interesting. There's lots of ways we can make hull health, armor, and shield all interplay together.