I saw your post Rawls, and I was going to make a citation to its presence as a partial inspiration (I went looked for similar threads before I posted this).

I liked some of your ideas, but I believe it is both overly complex in certain areas and not enough in others. Simply 'doubling' the current bonus of armor plates is going to leave many things overpowered in my opinion and your method of making the mass addition dependent on volume or something of the sort doesn't actually work. This is why: A 1600 plate currently add a Ton of armor at a small (3%) increase in mass to a battleship. The SAME amount of armor would be added to a battlecruiser, but with the same (3%). This type of over-sized application needs to have a penalty, and since the amount of armor does not scale, the mass addition should not either to keep things more in line with how they are now. I really don't believe that CCP wants people in Harbingers to ass 5200 armor and then be flying around with relatively the same speed and agility.

I don't know if there needs to be a 1000MW plate adding 8400 armor, this seems more game-changing than anything else. The only change would be freeing up a low slot on certain battleship configurations. I'm not sure CCP would want to go changing the stats of EVERY module currently held by people and fitted to ships. Just a more intrusive change to the game and I don't believe is needed.

As for the point about silly-slow battlecruisers...I agree that this is a little crazy and immersion breaking. I had the following changes in my first iteration of this idea:


Step 1

- Eliminate static mass increase for all armor plates and replace this drawback with a percent mass increase as follows
---- Meta lvl 0: 3.6% increase
---- Meta lvl 1: 3.4% increase
---- Meta lvl 2: 3.2% increase
---- Meta lvl 3: 3.0% increase
---- Meta lvl 4: 2.8% increase
---- Meta lvl 5: 3.6% increase (Tech 2)
---- Meta lvl 6: 3.6% increase (Storyline)
---- Meta lvl 6&7: 2.0% increase (Faction)

But then I realized that fitting a 800mm plate or a 1600mm plate to a BC would result in the same mass addition. This doesn't seem quite right! And if we make these percentages scale with the size of the plate, then we really need to cap it at the above %s lest we affect battleship class vessels more than we already do...

Something a bit more uniform might work, however. Let's consider that a 1600mm plate should add 4% mass to a ship. We could then have a 800mm plate add 3%, 400mm and everything below add 2%, and the faction versions could be 3,2,1% respectively. As it stands now, most plates add around 10% mass to a ship in a good setup, but if we're going to be adding 4,3,2%, is there enough of a handicap to fitting oversized plates?

Maybe this would help, but it's going to change the way plated ships move quite a bit. Maybe that's just what we need, but I hesitate to pitch such a substantial change when the Bigger issue is the actual value of the armor bonus.

Again, this is well-intentioned but game-breaking in practice. Dual-plated battleships are common, and a 16% mass addition would be a 6-times increase in mass over the current plates, making these ships turn more like carriers. A 1600mm currently plate adds 3m kg to a Armageddon that weighs 100m kg. In no way should this change result in an Increase to battleship mass addition. I believe that to be paramount.