It's your imagination....my settlers are all tooled up and they still get kidnapped. It's gotten to the point that I suspect some of them...Lucy and Connie Abernathy especially....want to be carried off and ravished by Raiders and/or Mutants.

When you get 20+ setllers in a place, watching them all respond to an attack with lasers is a hell of a thing. Their beams help find the attackers better than VATS, usually.

heh I gave two settlers in taffington boathouse kelloges armor and a mini gun and bos combat armor and machine gun(like the ones triggermen use)

This is an important point. Their equipment won't have anything to do with stopping an attack from happening, but WILL make a big difference in how fast they finish an attack. Settlers also have the annoying habit of charging attackers instead of staying behind defenses. The better their equipment, the better they will do on these "suicide" missions.

Just be aware that piles of ash are still permanent before arming settlers with lasers.

why don't you just strip them down to standard and remake them the way you need...?

Sometimes it's just as hard to find matching base armor items because there are also MANY different base armor types: leather, sturdy leather, heavy leather, combat, sturdy combat, heavy combat, etc. Without the necessary base item, I can't do anything. Also, most enemies don't wear complete sets of anything, which may be the biggest reason why I haven't been able to collect too many complete sets. Of course, the lowest leather armor items are abundant, but they are too weak at my level, so I've stopped collecting those. I'm aiming for armor that gives at least 30-50 damage resistance per settler, so leather armor is not enough. I think a settler should at least have more DR than a turret, which has about 20-30 DR.