Visual damage indicates your armor damage, as does the colored silhouette in the status readout. Given that armor resistance is directional I think that approach is ideal, otherwise you restrict the system to having, say, four facings of armor (in order to keep readouts manageable) rather than the more sophisticated approach we have now. Your actual hull hp, which is global, is noted both as a lifebar and a numerical readout. Given the nature of each I honestly think the representation on individual ships is near ideal tbh.
The one point where I feel it could perhaps be improved is in the tactical map--you can't tell at a glance the armor status of the ships in your fleet, only their hull HP, which can be a tad misleading in relating the actual survivability of the ship. In the tacmap I think it might be reasonable to replace the ship icons with their respective armor grid overlays (as long as game performance can be maintained). Though to keep ships identifiable at a glance it would probably be best to replace missing armor chunks with red grid squares, rather than black/missing.
In fact, I'd even like a little sidebar indicating status of the entire fleet even when not in the tacmap. Something like the sidebar in sins of a solar empire (though again using the armor silhouettes instead of just simple icons, plus of course the hull/flux bars). There have been numerous times where I've been manually piloting for just 30 seconds or so, only to come to the tacmap and realize that I somehow lost half my fleet while I wasn't paying attention...Obviously if that happens it means I positioned myself poorly, but I'd still like to know that my ships are at least on their way to going boom, rather than having the sinking feeling of noticing a conspicuous absence...
