There's some weird stuff going on with armour mass. Generally, armours labelled as "heavy" should be heavier than regular plates.
Ideally they would be significantly heavier to make ship armour limits more of a deciding factor in choosing a ship, but that can come later.
Here's some of the oddities:
-Ceramic plate has a mass of 2600, while Heavy Ceramic has a mass of 2500
-Plasteel shares the same mass as Heavy Plasteel
-Ceralloy shares the same mass as Heavy Ceralloy
Definitely. We could use a better spread, too, so that the mass limits are actually important. The best armors(Blast Plate equivalents, Iocrym armor) tend to be light enough that armor mass restrictions don't really matter, because the locked armors aren't all that useful.
We could just rename the heavy armors to dense armors.
All other armours have a mass progression, so I'm pretty sure this is an error.
Armor in general needs a look at using the same algorithmic system that's been used for weapons.
Keep in mind though that raising the mass of some of these armors creates a nerf to other things: Eg: Heavy ceralloy is pretty much the best armor you can fit to a 300D or 310A auton. Increasing the mass will thus affect COnstellation balance.
Thus I'd suggest looking at all these factors holistically and trying to set up a spread of auton, light, medium and heavy armors at all levels, and making armor limits for ships actually matter.
First of all, I think that armor mass should just be orthogonal to tech levels in the same way that WMD is.
Second, the Transcendence universe is in dire need of industrial standardization.
Playerships and autons currently fall into the following groups of armor limitations:
light autons: 4 tons
heavy autons: 5 tons
light ships: 6 tons
medium ships: 12 tons
heavy ships: 20 tons
Assuming that all commercial ships fall into these same categories and ignoring the fringe cases of armors designed for a specific ship model. It seems like corporations would be trying to maximize their profits by manufacturing armors in the fewest sizes that would fit the most ship types while providing the most protection for their targeted ship classes.
No reasonable corporation would make 6.1 ton armor segments, simply because they couldn't sell them to light ship owners and because medium ship owners would prefer heavier armors to maximize their protection.
Corporations would instead manufacture a 6 ton armor segment that could serve as heavy armor for light ships and light armor for medium and heavy ships.
Additionally, instead of having two separate manufacturing processes for 6 ton armor segments and 12 ton armor segments, a smart corporation would try to design 3 ton armor segments that could easily be attached together at retail stations in layers to either form 6 ton segments for light ships, 12 ton segments for medium ships, 18 ton segments for heavy ships, or be sold by themselves for use with autons.
Although they're not coded into the game, non-player ships might have other limits. Also, I'd assume that a lot of armor design and selection decisions are driven by protection to cost ratio, rather than "what's the absolute most armor we can fit on this frame?"
In 1.8 Alpha 4 I've renamed (and re-massed) armor to fit into consistent guidelines: https://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=71140
Thanks!