Armor will not be tougher/thicker! Not for a long, long time. It will be thinner and weaker, because the mass overwhelmingly adversely effects acceleration.
Not buying this...I think it's safe to assume the future will bring stronger/lighter materials so I see no reason why a combat space ship set centuries into the future can't have stronger armor than a 21st century tank...maybe not physically thicker, but definitely stronger and able to resist more...
I don't care how thick your armor is, one thermonuke and your history.
Nuclear weapons (and really any non-pentrating explosive) aren't nearly as effective in space...I'm not saying they won't hurt, but I think you are grossly overestimating their effectiveness...from a realistic point of view, any missile is going to be easy to shoot down or disrupt, and nuclear missiles (which likely will be larger) would only be easier to defend against...from a "Sins" point of view, all LRM missiles are nuclear, yet somehow every ship in the game manages to take lots of shots just fine...one thermonuke in Sins hardly dents a trade ship...
Additionally the rounds would be small and many not few and large. A relativistic weapon for instance, a gram of matter will slam into a ship with as much power as a gram of matter/antimatter coming into contact with the ship. Which is of course, as powerful as you can get. Leave the chemicals at home please.
I highly doubt "autocannons" are relativistic weapons, and those are the weapons that incendiary shells is tied to...anyway it doesn't matter, your quoted number of 14% is hardly relativistic (you are talking less than a 2% difference from classical values)...
"Armor" in future spacecraft will more likely take the form of Whipple shields and thin layers of particular materials to counter gamma rays, particle weapons, etc. Not at all like a tank or battleship of today (there is a reason no one has battleships any more....).
Let's just say these are the "amors" used by ships in sins, ones that are really good at absorbing pure kinetic energy and energy based weapons....seems to me like the perfect time to use something different such as chemicals...it is not about raw energy, whipple shields are a great example of that...they are specifically designed to deal with one type of weapon...guided missiles of lower energy will easily be more effective against whipple shields than kinetic weapons of higher energy...and, a slow moving projectile loaded to react with metal seems like a fine counter to a whipple shield...
There will be no "incendiary" warheads. Super absurd when you realize how much heat dissipates in space.
Never said warheads...name of ability is "Incendiary shells"...and you are kidding me if you don't think you can't fit lots of chemicals in a shell shot by a giant space ship...handhelds can shoot incendiary shells (though that's not really the kind of incendiary we want)....naval ships could, they just don't because at this time we have no problem penetrating the armor of anything so why bother...pick any decent sized round on a naval ship these days, and I'm sure you could engineer it to fit lots of chemicals if you wanted to....
As a thermal sidenote, it's not like you are making a fire here, you are starting a reaction that releases tremendous amounts of heat...and actually, heat dissipation occurs more in an atmosphere than in space....in an atmosphere, you have both blackbody radiation and conduction....in space, you only have radiation....aside from pressure issues and oxygen, you'd actually keep warm better in space than you would in Antarctica...even if this weren't the case, I think its fair to say the incendiary rounds will penetrate to some degree even if they don't break through...so, you have a reaction occuring well inside the ships armor, not on the surface exposed to space....
As a super lame example, I see no reason why you couldn't make some nice shells that initiate a thermite reaction after lodging themselves into the armor...and I'm sure the future could easily bring all the technology necessarily to make more violent reactions to deal with stronger materials...
As for the above quote, in reality, of course is ridiculous in the light of other options. In the sins universe, it makes more sense for "incendiary" to do a damage per second effect (as the Marza) and armor piercing to do a armor debuff. It would not make sense for incendiary to debuff armor, as more armor would make incendiary less effective. The devs got this exactly right, though we can argue for the number crunching balance or for a different ability/secondary effect.
This makes absolutely no sense...something that pierces armor reduces armor? If you punch a small hole in a ships armor (say, with GRG or Meson Bolt), you have done nothing to the rest of the ships armor...especially if you assume that the armor is meant to dissipate kinetic energy, you can't even get away with a "well it probably damaged the superstructure of the ship" (which to me seems more like more raw damage, hull damage, or debuff to hull repair)...sure, you've done damage, but how does piercing through the armor in one place make it universally weaker to successive attacks? Compare that to nanites or a series of metal-eating chemicals hitting the ships in many places...now that makes sense why such an attack of that nature would affect the ship's armor...
FYI, meson bolt is a stream of subatomic particles...unlike GRG, snipe, and gauss weapons in general (Ragnarov and TEC defense platforms), the energy delivered by meson bolt is relativistic so I suppose one could argue one shot of those might damage the superstructure more and blah blah blah ships is more susceptible to future attacks....
To be honest though I don't like meson bolt reducing armor either for the same reason I don't like GRG reducing armor...armor piercing rounds penetrate the armor but they don't make the armor inneffective...shoot an armor piercing round at a tank, and you have one pretty bullet hole...start melting the tanks armor, and now normal rounds are going to be able to get through...
