Firstly, love the game, waiting semi-patiently for part 2
Love the new ships, was thinking about...
the ablative armour, and all the unique hullmods for invictus. I started to think maybe the Ablative armour could be a standard hullmod, something like x3 base armour, but damage reduction reduced by 90%, so then you could apply the same "antiquated" armour to say the onslaught. Tweek the hullmod (and invictus starting armour) so that it's always a nerf given the OP cost of the hullmod. Then people can see if it's "better" or not for themselves.
But then i though maybe for smaller hulls, it would actually be quite good still against larger weapons. Leading to maybe high-tech energy weapons could be the reason why ablative armour is no longer used, with energy weapons having a 50% (100%) bonus damage against it (or maybe work it into the damage reduction, -50% against ballistic and missle, -90% amount energy). Kinda the defenses are really good against low-tech ballistic and missle weapons, but the advent of high tech weapons forced a refit and redesign of armour systems.
The Invictus was too big and costly to refit/redesign and remains the only ablative armoured dinosaur left.