Due to the fact that you can die really fast, even with body armor that should protect against weapons, I've decided to improve body armor effectiveness.
What I have done so far, is I have increased the bullet protection for all armors except the ones that don't really have any real bullet protection. Another thing I have changed is the way that armor works.
For those of you that know, body armor works this way, there are 2 types of armor, soft armor, and hard armor. Soft armor is made out of kevlar, and works by absorbing and re-distributing the energy of bullets over a wider area. Kevlar is probably more durable and much lighter than hard armor, yet it is only really effective against pistol rounds. Hard armor, on the other hand, is usually made out of ceramic that is comprised of boron-carbide, boron-silicate, or boron nitride etc. It is VERY BRITTLE, in fact, ceramic armor often breaks when shot, what it does when it breaks, is that it disperses the kinetic energy of a bullet over a larger area, much like how kevlar does. However, when ceramic armor does this, the portion of the armor that is shot is DESTROYED. In other words, shooting ceramic armor multiple times will damage the armor until it is compromised and it can be penetrated.
I am applying this principle in the mod by making armor degrade very rapidly when under fire, I've changed the immunities to fire-wound and explosion for most of the higher end suits so much that I'll probably have to make suits cost 2-4x less just to cover the repair costs of them.
Some of the later game suits like the military suits and exoskeletons have upwards of 75% protection from bullets, The duty exo I'm adding actually has 90% fire_wound protection, but even with all that you will need to realize that it doesn't make you invincible, as I explained above, armor's protection is only temporary. I don't really think you can lug around a bunch of 8lb SAPI plates and swap them out in the middle of a gunfight in the Zone.
Oh please dont make armor degrade quickly in ANY way. I understand that need for it when under very heavy fire, but thats always been my pet peeve. Its like - oh ****, this mod has ridiculous armor degrade, uninstall. Annoys the poop out of me
I'm reducing the costs to make repairs reasonable. I might include the old suit stats and actor and m_stalker stats as a option. You shouldn't get into situations where your armor is chewed up and survive anyways. I managed to make it through the CNPP with only losing 50% of my suit, and this was because I was careful.
It fits in rather well with how this mod rewards caution and punishes recklessness.
How about including 'replacement ceramic plates'?, I once saw body armor during a documentary, adn from what I remember of it (it was a very long time ago!), that component could easily be replaced.
I'm just saying don't go overboard because it will be unenjoyable.
It would be cool if you could just swap armour plates instead of having to repair the whole suit sometimes.
I would implement something like that if I could, hell it might even be possible for me to do if I made the plates behave like a repair kit, or food that functions like a repair kit, and they spawned on NPCs when killed. it might need a script that damages the plates when they are shot in the torso and may only repair suits partially, which would emphasize making head shots So as not to damage their armor.
Know of any repair kit mods that I can use so I can try this out?
I have no idea about that, sadly. I was thinking you could configure it so it would occupy an artifact slot or something similar, and so temporarily boost armour protection and durability while degrading with damage taken. But yeah.
Maybe you're on to something here, I could add it as an artifact with nothing but bullet protection, but how to configure it to have condition so that they wear out?
I'm afraid you will have to figure that out by yourself, my skills in this area are rather limited. If you could just find a way for the player not to be able to equip more than one (or two, some body armors allow a back plate I think) it would be nice.
Another way would be to implement it as an attachment to the suit, like weapon attachments. Again I'm not too sure how it would work in coding terms.
You know your MS Paint skills suck when you can't even draw a stalker eating a piece of body armor.
It's sad, I'm usually better than this.
I see some of you regret this... But if your armor is like this, the enemy one too... So I think you'll enjoy taking by surprise bandits with a such feature =D
I was testing this yesterday, and it pans out really well with the new suit prices. Yeah, they can get destroyed quickly in a fight if you aren't careful, but they don't cost much to repair and most of them cost less initially.
It works well with how the suits were originally laid out in the game. There are different armors placed along in maps at key locations, so they wanted you to pick up new armor in each of the locations once yours was exhausted.
I tested the Beril-5M special forces suit and the stalker suit, and both of them worked fine in combat and were rather cheap to repair. Each of those has about +10 more bullet protection now.