I decided to take yesterday off of work, because holiday and also shucking corn.
I didn’t do a lot of recording because it was mostly coding and debugging again. I determined the source of that mysterious bug that pointed at a bit of the code only once and then never again; it’s because that code referred to that object’s spriteRenderer, a reference to which hadn’t been created before the function was called. Moving it up into the Awake function fixed that problem.
I still need to finish the part of the UI that indicates what armor is next to be fired and the code necessary to set a piece of armor to its broken state.