Idea: Hardened Armor / Don't worry about the scuffed paint

[BlakeMW]

Motivation

This is a bit of a first world factorio problem, but sometimes you're driving your tank around and take some incredibly trivial damage, immediately a repair bot pops out and then gets left behind. Or worse, you drive through a fire patch and take some incredibly trivial damage, a repair bot pops out, takes fire damage, another repair bots pops out to repair the first bot, takes fire damage, etc.

Solution 1: Don't worry about the scuffed paint

Basically treat damage of less than 0.99 as undamaged, that is the health bar still shows as full, and construction bots don't bother popping out to repair, once at least 1 damage is taken, then a bot pops out to repair. (this wouldn't prevent manual repair)

Solution 2: Hardened Armor

Give certain vehicles a "Hardened Armor" property, this means that damage which - after resistances have been applied - falls below a certain threshold, say 0.5, is simply shrugged off. The vehicle takes literally no damage and cannot be killed by "death by a thousand paper cuts". Candidate vehicles to apply this to would be the Tank and Trains. No more triggering a repair bot cascade because the Train drives through a fire patch.

This has a solid basis in realism, you can try all day to scratch a piece of glass with your fingernail and (assuming you have a standard issue human fingernails) will never succeed, likewise suitable metals can sit in a fire for literally years and take negligible damage. Vehicles like bulldozers can be built tough enough that they can knock down small trees all day without taking what would be called damage, the idea that it would take a heavy blow or high speed collision to damage such a vehicle is not unreasonable.

Hardened armor could be a intrinsic property, or a researchable upgrade to improve the armor of Tanks and Trains.

As a side note, in some cases a train which collides with things already has this property, as a sufficiently heavy train (about 6 wagons) can plow into things, say tanks or other trains (or smaller things like biters) and take literally no damage from the collision. So this idea wouldn't be overpowered by any stretch of the imagination, it's a case of formalizing a behaviour which already exists in an inconsistent form.

[Philip017]

i always wondered why i couldn't just ignore the small amount of damage taken when driving through trees, or at least wait until the tank was sufficiently damaged before the bot would jump out to repair it, especially while the vehicle is in motion, i have lost too many robots to my trains zooming down the tracks at 200+ and out pops a robot - i just have to shrug it off and say bye robot, cause that one aint coming home.