The current implementation of armor is ineffective.

Weight blocks offer little protection from rounds larger than machine gun caliber (and no protection against incendiary or high explosive), while massively increasing weight and size of a vehicle. More importantly, they can only be placed as a flat surface, which discourages angles and detail. Worst of all, damage done to nearly blocks bleeds through armor, meaning a hit on a single non-weight block amidst a weight block wall will completely bypasses all the armor.

This, in my mind, makes the armor system defective.

However, the developers have rejected the idea adding an armored version of every block in the game, as it would massively bloat the block library. This is completely fair. So, I am making this report to make the point that armor is defective as-is, as well as proposing a solution that does not require additional blocks.

This solution is two-fold:

Firstly, the implementation of angle mechanics for rounds. A round hitting a surface at an extremely oblique angle should do little to no damage, while a round hitting a surface at a perpendicular angle should do maximum damage. This is how real life tanks are designed around, as well as other armor on ships, turrets, apcs, etc. While it would be nice to see the round richochet if the angle is oblique enough, that is really extra credit. What really matters is just the damage value for the shot being determined by the angle at which it hits. This should be simple enough to implement; take the normalized magnitude of the cross product between the bullet's velocity vector and the surface's normal vector, and multiply the damage value by one-minus-this. Perpendicular hits will lead to a damage scale of nearly 1, while oblique hits will have a damage scale of nearly 0.

Secondly, the implementation of innate armor values based on subgrid density. What this means is, for a given volume of a subgrid, the heavier it is, the more armored it is. This means that while a car and a tank have roughly the same volume, if the tank weighs 10,000 mass and the car weighs 1,000 mass, the tank would be 10x more armored on every block. This encourages armoring but it's balanced by the extra mass added to achieve armoring. It would allow for sloped surfaces (made of regular ol' wedges) to function as thick angled armor, without the need for special armor-type blocks. It would eliminate goofy scenarios like using a pistol to break the main battle cannon of a tank, which is currently possible.

I know that these solutions will vastly improve the weapons gameplay in Stormworks with no significant drawbacks or exploits because it has already been applied in another game I played, Homebrew: Patent Unknown. This game uses these two mechanics for their sandbox building, and it worked to great success in my opinion.

Please consider the above, and I appreciate feedback in the comments.