Automatic Armor Distribution
Starting from version 1.5.0, LSML has a feature dubbed Automatic Armor Distribution (Shortened to AAD here).
The purpose of AAD is to shorten the time it takes to get your armor just right. It's a tool that'll assist you, it's not intended to be fully automagic but rather make the process of distributing your armor faster.
There are two sliders, Amount and Front/Back in the AAD panel on your 'mech loadout.
Drag the Amount slider to set the total amount of armor you want on your loadout. It will round down to the closest half ton and distribute armor points on your mech in an attempt to reach the wanted amount. Armor points are distributed among all components that are not manually set, according to a few rules described in "How it works". If you adjust the armor values of some component manually, the other components will have their armor values automatically adjusted to compensate so that you always have the amount set on the slider.
You can drag the Front/Back slider to adjust how you would like AAD to distribute armor between front and back sides of the components. The value under the slider is the ratio between front and back armor. I.e. setting the slider to 6, will make sure that your front has 6 times more armor than your back.
Components which have been manually set are off limits for AAD, and will not be modified under any circumstances. If the manually set armor values prevent AAD from achieving your wanted armor amount, it will try to get as close as possible.
You can right click on the armor label to the left or to the right of the armor input field at the top of the component at any time to allow the component's armor to be set by AAD again if you have adjusted the armor manually. You can also use the Reset manually set armor button under the sliders in the AAD panel to allow all components to be adjusted by AAD.
Internally AAD calculates a priority for each component. If a component is vital for survival such as legs, head, center torso, and left/right torso if you have an XL engine equipped, the component will receive a very high priority. If the loss of the component would destroy equipment somewhere in the mech, the component will get a middle priority. For example an empty torso where the attached arm has weapons will also get middle priority as loosing the torso would loose the weapons in the arm. If a component is not vital for survival and contains no equipment then it will have a very low priority.
Armor is then distributed in relation to how high priority a component has. Higher priority means more armor, less priority means less armor.