Adaptive armour

From Command and Conquer Wiki

An exclusive Steel Talons upgrade, the Adaptive armour can temporarily increase the vehicle's durability and confers EMP immunity, at the cost of fire rate, which is drastically reduced whenever the armour is activated. Many Steel Talon commanders typically kept Adaptive armour activated as much as possible, mainly because they saw that the benefits vastly outweigh the penalty.

A sly tactic of Steel Talon commanders was to activate Adaptive armour and then activate the Railgun Accelerator on the "Adapted" units. Activating the Railgun Accelerator enables faster rate of fire and more damage, but would also damage the units utilising this feat. This particular tactic would give the units a much reduced health penalty since the penalty was mostly absorbed by the Adaptive armour, while significantly marginalising the rate of fire penalty of the Adaptive armour. With all this happening, the railgun accelerated, and the Adaptive armoured unit would only lose a third of its health for the total health loss (compared to much harsher losses if the armour wasn't activated) and have a rate of fire only slightly slower than the normal rate of fire of the unit.