In the manual, it says p3 “Without armor penetration being higher than the AVERAGE armor strength for a ship, the shot will bounce off,(…)”. But it seems that it is actually, the TOTAL armor strength that is taken into account :
I have organised a fight with 1 cruiser against some fighters.
1 armor only. The armor takes damages from the first fighter shoot
2 armors. For a while, the armors take no or very little damage. After a level of damage, it is wipped out quickly.
If the shot bouncing was governed by the average of the armors, the behaviour with 2 armors would be the same (lots of damages since the beginning) as with 1, (except that it would be depleted twice slower). There would not be that first stage with good resistance.
That behaviour seems quite fine to me, but the manual might be wrong here…
In order to penetrate (damage) armor, the weapon’s armor penetration needs to be higher than the target’s armor, which is the total armor value of all modules divided by the total number of modules +1 (there’s a hidden ‘tactical module’ used by the game and which counts towards the total number of modules, so you can never have max armor).
That means iff you put 3 armor modules each with a 100 armor protection value, and add 4 further modules (weapons, engines, whatever with no armor value), that’s ( 3 * 100 ) / (7 +1) = 37.5 average armor.
Only weapons with an armor penetration value higher than 37.5 would be able to damage your ship’s armor. If one of the armor modules gets damaged, its protection value drops by the amount of damage, hence lowering the average armor protection of the ship.
Please note that every shot has a chance to bypass the target’s protection regardless of armor penetration. The chance, IIRC, is around 1-2%, so the more shots (say, a couple squadron of fighters with fighter lasers), the more likely.
“Average” armor there means the average estimated coverage of armor across the entire ship, not the literal strength average between two plates of armor.
Before 1.36, the ship stats window (which tells you the average armor) would not take the hidden module into account. Now it does. The tactical hidden module still counts towards the total number of modules though.
still could have sworn that was patched out…and even if it isn’t, there was another thread where cliffski said he will work on it since its not right the tact mod counts.