Awesome, that revision is just what we want to keep up with their ships. I'm confident that we'd have a chance this turn, although if we don't push back to TC, I'd want our marines to defend. If they can keep themselves mostly alive, we'll be able to push forward much more effectively next turn with reinforcements.
I'm very much looking forward to lunching armoured battleships, equipped with central targeting systems. Then we release the "Dart" fighters and we have a properly modernised navy.
On a related note, I've been thinking about ship armour and how we are going to need to improve on light copper plating some time soon. Thus, I went and compared a bunch of metals. I'm assuming that Aether blasts only impart heat on the target, rather a percussive force as well, otherwise we'll have to think about metal toughness also. I've collected the Melting Point and Specific Heat Capacity of various metals, and calculated the "energy to melt" one kg of that metal. As you can see, there are several options better than Copper. I've also included the Heat Transfer coefficient, which is useful for if we attempt to design our armour to transfer the heat to a radiator.
Metal | Melting Point ('C) | Specific Heat (kJ/kg K)) | Energy to melt (kJ/ kg) | Heat Transfer Coefficient (W/m K) |
Titanium | 1670 | 0.54 | 901.8 | 21 |
Molybdenum | 2620 | 0.25 | 655 | 140 |
Nickel | 1453 | 0.44 | 639.32 | 90 |
Cobalt | 1495 | 0.42 | 627.9 | 69 |
Manganese | 1244 | 0.48 | 597.12 | 30 |
Copper | 1085 | 0.39 | 423.15 | 386 |
Bronze | 925 | 0.435 | 402.375 | 26 |
tl;dr: If we design airship armour plates of nickel with attached copper radiator fins, our armour will be able to absorb a lot more aether blasts before failing. If we back it with bronze, we then also get a tough armour plate that can resist solid shot as well. Combining this with our topaz cores should create some seriously hard-to-kill ships.
In theory we could use titanium, but I imagine cost would be prohibitive.