Thank you for answering, it's helping me to think through my points a little more clearly.
For Hardened Shields, you also have to consider that 1/4th less flux translates to a theoretic increase for both flux capacity *and* flux vent rate. If you were to sink 12 OP into capacitors instead of buying Hardened Shields, it would take you longer to dissipate than it would 100% of a Hardened Shields build with the same number of vents.
It did cross my mind that the flux venting would take longer instead of using hardened shields, but there are a lot of cases where you are much better off investing in more vents/flux capacity:
Let us take another destroyer class, with a terrible shield generator; the Condor:
Dam/Flux: 1.2
Flux dissipation: 110
Flux Capacity: 2200
Once again Hardened shields cost 12 ordinance points. Let's split those points between Dissipation and capacity:
Flux disipation: 170 (55% increase)
Flux capacity: 3400 (55% increase)
Or hardened shields for a 25% decrease in the amount of damage taken. Both should have similar dissipation rates since Flux capacity and dissipation were increased equally.
Thinking about it more there should be some benefit to much bigger ships with a large flux pool with decent flux dissipation. For example the Paragon:
Dam/Flux: 0.6
Flux dissipation: 1250
Flux capacity: 25000
Hardened Shield cost 30 points, distributing these:
Flux dissipation: 1400 (12% increase)
Flux capacity: 28000 (12% increase)
Or hardened shields would give us a 25% decrease in damage taken. Even then it's still not a flat out advantage, since by increasing the flux dissipation and flux capacity equally the paragon will build flux slower when firing weapons.
On the otherhand, against small fast moving target that attacking (ie fighters, frigates), where we aren't really utilizing many of our main flux draining weapons, I can see the Paragon coming off better against those types of attacks with hardened shields.
Still, with ships with small flux pools and dissipation, you seem better off swapping your hardened shield for an equal increase of flux dissipation and flux capacity.
I played around with 'high-tech' Hounds in the old version with SS+ a bit. They seemed to do really well. Hounds are among the fastest ships in the game, and if they take part in fleet battles then they have the advantage of being able to always disengage and vent quickly. One-on-one against a fast enemy, a Hound will have much less breathing room.
I never even touched hounds until this update. I tried the Cerberus and was dissappointed "all shield less ships are rubbish" I said to myself, but then I found one of those 'A' variant hounds at the shop and purchased one to try out. I've been a convert ever since. I've actually recently given up on SO on them, but SO + Unstable injector is pretty fun to see how fast you can go
Heavy Armor: Yeah, I use it a lot. The downside is very slight, and phase ships as well as bigger ships with spare OP in particular will benefit. Armor doesn't scale linearly, as in, the damage resistance effect will get better and better the higher your armor value is. It doesn't do much for some ships. Mostly those that already have abysmal armor rating but great shields. Hyperion will be made of paper whether you add 100 armor or not. Ships that are fast and stay out of the brawl zone also can go without it, like the Heron. Which is a bit short on OP anyway.
IPDAI: Useful on ships that have lots of Tac Lasers with +gyro speed. Railguns are also extremely accurate and able to take out some missiles. To be honest, I don't use IPDAI as much anymore in this version. Reason being that dealing with missiles is always a secondary to killing the thing that's firing the missiles. And Tac Lasers without IPDAI are much less fussy and will concentrate on fighters / frigates - which they're extremely good against.
Interesting, thanks for your feedback, i'll play around a bit more with heavy armour once I get around to figuring out exactly how damage is applied.