[Bug?] Armor and Shields

I don’t know if something isn’t working right, but armor and shields just seems off to me. A pretty standard cruiser design for me has maybe three fast recharge shields, two heavy armor, and a nano-repair. I was under the impression that damage is split between the three shields. Since they are all the same time they should all go down at the same time. But I’ll notice significant damage done to the armor of these ships before it goes down. I’m pretty positive it’s not fighter damage. They are armored well enough that only critical hits would damage it, and it is not a swarm of fighter around it.

I’ve noticed many times that the armor on a ship like this will be destroyed before the shields go down. Now three fast recharge shields can absorb more damage than two heavy armor, but that just seems off to me.

I also know it’s not disruptor fire because the white bar is never going down. This is also not the new ships AOE explosion damage, because it would happen in the last patch, and happens now even before ships are destroyed.

I can’t figure out exactly what is going on. Maybe it is working right, but I’m not sure.

Yes, I noticed this same thing in the last two battles I’ve run, but as I did have lots of fighters on the scene, I wasn’t sure if it was them or not.

I saw the extreme of this with one enemy Cruiser, the Shields went down and it exploded with the next Frigate hit it took. No Fighters around that Cruiser at that time either.

Shields are leaky when you have more than 1. When damage is dealt so that one shield goes down the remaining damage hits the hull. The remaining shields then wrap around and share further damage between them. Later on there may be a module that balances power between shields so that they become less leaky. Or such is their intended behaviour.

I had a battle today where no fighters on the enemy side lasted past the first minute, so that didn’t really do the damage. Out of the four shielded, armored cruisers only one survived past the initial collision of the two fleets. This cruiser continued to take stead fire, but never enough to collapse it’s shields. But it took enough of this leak damage to drain the nano-repair module and both heavy armors. Maybe it is intended. That’s just what I see happening right now.

I haven’t been mounting multiple Shields recently, so should this leakage still be happening with a single shield that in the Ship Designer indicates its at 100% effectiveness?

I’ve never seen this happen to a single-shield vessel. It’s pretty much necessary to mount some armor + at least one nano repair on pretty much anything that you want to survive enemy fire, since a single shield is nothing but a speedbump to anything but beams.