Pretty straight forward suggestion... I think it would be fun and cool if we could equip armor pieces on hardpoints instead of weapons. Would be a small cost and benefit, like small slot armor giving 500 armor for 1 op, medium slot armor giving 1000 armor for 2 op, large slot giving 1500 armor for 3 op, without turning into a sprite piece that takes hull integrity damage (so that battleship with light armor won't go down because it's been shot at the light armor repeatedly). When the armor runs out projectiles should just travel through it. I thought about the armor giving hull integrity but figured it would be cooler if it literally worked like additional armor on top of the ship, meaning that it's very location specific (would be meaningless to have armor on hardpoint that's in center of the ship's sprite). This means that some ships would work a lot better with this suggestion, like enforcer/medusa/auora because they all have lot of hardpoints in forward direction.
Main reason for thinking of this is because I'm a bit obsessed about filling out every slot or keeping ship loadout symmetrical, and often I found efficient loadouts force me to run lot of empty hardpoints which irritates me a lot every time I look at it. Then I thought about just having armor placed in hardpoints for looks. Then I thought it would be neat if they also offered bit of extra health and armor for the ships since hardpoints do look rather... fragile most of the time so having something sturdy covering it up would be good for the ship.
