I'm more putting this idea out there rather than making a full on request, but it probably should be considered one.

For those of you who don't know. Ablative armor is designed to shatter or disintegrate on weapon impact.

What could possibly be the use of this? You ask.
Well, it is used in a variety of circumstances, by transferring kinetic energy from the projectile to armor shards that break off, impact damage is decreased on the target. One of the reasons armor piercing rounds are so effective is that they move while the armor they're piercing doesn't. The same principle goes behind any way to calculate damage between a moving object and its target.

And now the downside:
Ablative armor will not protect against energy weapons as effectively as it does against kinetic. If you had a choice between using no armor, or ablative armor, it would still be better, but the only thing keeping you from being burnt alive inside the armor is how thick it is.

Good examples of ablative material you may see around the household: Graphite, ceramics(Porcelain, Clay, etc) I take no responsibility for destroyed pencils and pottery.

Edit: Almost forgot to include how I think it'll work.

A bullet hits a target, instead of piercing the target, a couple little dirt-style specks of the chest sprite get broken off, eventually, the bullets hitting the armor will chip away at all of it, leaving the unarmored/non-ablative armored soldier beneath. Of course, chipping off the armor would leave areas vulnerable, maybe a double layer would be in order. This would work on vehicles, on infantry, and on combat shields. Like I said before, a weapon with no kinetic force based damage would likely inflict the majority of its base damage, reduced slightly by heat absorption of the armor itself. (Hey, there's another idea, heat conductive armor)
This would be an armor alternative, perhaps, maybe as an equip-able 'shield' type item that somehow doesn't take up the offhand weapon.

Heat Absorbing/Conducting Armor:
Pretty simple, metal armor that would transfer heat to a heatsink on the target's back. Thus it has a weakpoint that if shot off, doubles the once halved effectiveness of energy weapons. The metal armor, no longer having a heatsink to to store and dissipate heat then acts as foil around a potato in an oven.

Luaised attachables is what you want, basically. But it would be hard as hell to make because:
a)You'd have to tell it each and every single type of round in CC, or add a Lua marker in each weapon to designate it as laser/kinetic, so that it knows what to halve the damage from.
b)Damage comes from wounds, I think.
c)Laser weapons work exactly the same way as bullet weapons in CC.
d)Lua doesn't work on attachables.

Lol, someone is playing Eclipse Phase.
Anyhow, You can't really determine plasma or fire against normal bullets unless you make everyone put tags in the preset name 'Energy' or 'Kinetic'.

I thought bullet velocity determined kinetic damage, Oh well... Maybe if the armor was scripted to detect projectile velocity and then.. No that wouldn't work because some energy weapons are slower. Quite the conundrum. Actually, I have no clue what Eclipse Phase is, but I'm going to google it now. I got the idea from my ceramics class and Mass Effect.

Wow, Eclipse Phase looks nice, I'm gonna try to introduce it to PolyCon as it seems to have only come out this month.

It might be both wounds and velocity, actually. But the deal is that laser weapons are basically bullet weapons that fire really fast bullets with long trails. That's it, they're only really different in visual effects and amount of damage they do.

Actually, Data could just add one otherwise pointless variable and make the game a lot more accessable to ini and Lua armoring.

Oh, Eclipse Phase is a game, the only game where I've ever heard of Ablative Armor, and how you described it was pretty much identical to how it is described in that game.

'Plasma' weapons are really just glowy bullets.
I think

Erm... MLC, you *are* aware Ablative Armor is very real and used in bulletproof vests and spacecraft re-entry shielding, right?

I never said it didn't exist.

I guess a better way to word it was that it was the first time I've ever heard of something called Ablative Armor.

So I guess I'm just ignorant on the subject.

Well, the way you said it before made it seem like Eclipse Phase came up with the thing... so, yeah, never mind. Let's get back to bursting bubbles.

Okay, I'll blow some.
I don't have any bubble formula though.

You can enhance the life of your bubbles by adding a bit of glycerin to the solution.

The great and honorable god of genocide PM'd me about my one variable suggestion. Rather than correct him on what I meant, and fight an uphill battle against someone who would propably in the end win and/or shame me, I'll just post what he said.
Oh yeah and, Grif says hi, and also that numgun sucks. I'm paraphrasing there a bit.

I think it would be better as seperate variables, Tiberian Sun had a setup like this:

Etc, etc.

This would allow for projectile energy weapons such as searing gobs of plasma that actually have enough mass to push something a bit and arc over low cover. With these presets, weapons can be told some of their behaviors just by the game's coding if you think of these settings as different script libraries. Damage calculation would become a little more standard, without limiting intentionally overpowered items too much. As an example of using two types of weapon descriptors, the destroyer(Dummy weapon) fires an energy ball that seems to move on its own depending on proximity to its surroundings and velocity. We all know energy doesn't just randomly change trajectory, so that implies there's some kind of mass to it.

Grif's way seems more efficient though. Mine would have been as well, IF I'm actually right about terminology, but regardless, having a variable saying yes or no to each kind of weapon is a bit wasteful.