Imagine a hugely massive ship made out of glass, though - why should that take less damage just because it's bigger?
Because, if it's made of glass that's strong enough and thick enough to keep it from shattering due to shearing forces caused by torque every time it turns or accelerates / decelerates, it's still
much, much stronger than a tiny ship
also made of that super-strong glass.
To put it into perspective, if a battleship runs over a speedboat, the net damage to the battleship (in game terms) is
zero (at most, it'd have scuffed paint), but the speedboat is
totally destroyed. Or, to use the glass example, throw a wineglass at an inch-thick chunk of plate glass. Mass matters.
That said, a fighter has a
lot more potential energy than the speedboat due to velocity (in reality, if we're caring at all about realism, fighters are moving at relativistic velocities), and we should expect it to hurt a
lot; after all, if we take David's picture of a Hound as a reference, then even the lowly Talon is as bulky as a real-world F111 and we should expect it to mass considerably more. So if we compare it to Kinetic munitions, its mass is several hundred to several thousand times more but its velocity is less than half and it's not optimized to be an attack projectile (let's presume that in the SS universe, just throwing bullets at shields doesn't work, never mind those machine-guns, they're actually gauss rifles with huge velocities compared to modern weapons).
I think a better way to represent this is to take velocity into the equation, but also figure in mass as a differential; a larger ship should be inherently more resistant to incoming damage.
However, the Armor mechanics in the game
already simulate that... so I'm still in the "not a real problem" camp; if anything, I think it should be
more damaging and
more visually spectacular when a fighter careens into a ship's hull. And if people don't like that, then they should be investing in the kind of AAA that destroys incoming fighters
utterly, or at least have that option and then pick something different, whereupon we can say, fairly, "you had a choice".
I think that's part of the problem here; in Vanilla, there aren't really
any weapons equivalent to a
: an expensive weapon with ammo problems that is poor at killing heavily-armored targets... but that is blazing death to incoming PD targets.
Since I kind of expect fighters and carrier warfare to continue to get buffed a little more (since they're still too inefficient vs. the alternatives, cost-wise, imho) I'd also kind of expect to see a modern-looking AA weapon show up. It's not hard to balance one, even in Vanilla; it'd basically just be a Thumper with a faster turn-rate, range tweaks and some rebal with an auto-fire AI optimized for an AA role (using the ANTI_FIGHTER AI hint).
