bulkhead armor is nice -it reduces how much DP you must have to sustain speed- but for
most ships and players, this is generally a useless waste of speed.

i suggest an improvement to what bulkhead does:

first use: bulkhead armor is meant to keep water out of the inner parts of the ship, so
it should keep its ability to keep speed.

second use: in addition to this, however, it should have the ability to slow flooding.
when your ship is hit and the blue "potential damage" marker is lower then the current
amount of DP, flooding occurs (like it does now) and adds damage to
the ship while the repair crews attempt to seal the holes and then pump out the water. (we
know this as soft defense) however, with more bulkhead armor, the water should seep in
SLOWER. in other words, the actual DP should reduce to the potential DP more slowly the
more bulkhead armor you have. This would let you keep your actual DP higher while your
repair crew work.

example: what really happens is that you keep DP during burning. so suppose normally when
you got
hit by a full battleship salvo your blue potential DP would say you were at 50% dp while
your actual DP would say you were at 90%. so without any bulkhead normally you would burn
down to somewhere like 70% DP before the blue bar came up to your actual DP bar, where you
would stop flooding (burning) and begin repairing. with some bulkhead what would happen is
you would get hit by a salvo and the blue bar would go to 50% and your DP would be 90%, as
before. however the burning would be slower so they would meet more around an area like
80% and begin repairing from there.

third use: This type of armor keeps the water out of the internal parts of the ship.
maintaining is easier, so i think bulkhead armor should also keep the max repairable
damage high. at the maximum amount of bulkhead, max repairable would stay at max nearly
all the time.

note that this type of armor does not actually reduce damage at all, though.

discuss.