In 1.07 you can have 10 cruisers firing off countless beam weapons at an enemy ship and not make a dent in it, or 100 fighters firing at a lone cruiser.
It would be nice to have damage calculating formula that would reduce the damage recieved based by a certain %. The % value would be calculated by the difference between penetration and resistance values.
Thoughts on this idea?
That’s the whole point: no matter how many anti-fighter lasers you dish out at a cruiser, nothing’s going to happen.
Get some plasma and missiles; their penetration is over 50 and the most resistance a shield can provide is 27.
If you’re feeling sneaky, disruptor bombs takes out their shielding via stability failure.
Beam weapons, for the most part, are armour busters. Their shield penetration is weak. So beam cruisers/frigates will tear a ship up only once something else has removed the shields. Got to watch those penetration values in the ship designer, and plan accordingly.
If there is any strategy guide for this game, the above should be printed in boldface at the very top. There’s probably no single factor that’s more important to basic strategy.
I do think it would be interesting if the penetration wasn’t an all or nothing calculation the way it is now. It seems silly that just barely penetrating the shield allows a shot to do it’s full damage (at least, according to how I understand the current mechanics). Like Kurotsuchi, I’d suggest that all shots do damage equal to the weapon’s damage rating multiplied by some a function of the difference between the weapon’s penetration value and the shield’s resistance or the armor’s thickness. The Logistic function (y = 1/(1+e^-x)) has the right shape for this sort of thing (though there are surely others that could work too):
With appropriate scaling, this would still allow shots that don’t come close to full penetration to gradually do some cumulative damage, and it would make having exactly enough penetration much less critical, since there would be a wider range of penetrations that could deal non-trivial damage. Of course, such a change would require a massive rebalancing of penetration and resistance values.
[edit: fixed equation of logistic function]
I think that there’s already some sort of critical hit % within the penetration code, because I’ve had my ships with heavy armor (20+ average) get slowly (really, really, really slowly) whittled down by laser fighters (which have an armor penetration of 6, IIRC).
because shields recharge, armor doesn’t, unless you were using a repair module.
Yes, there definitely is a small chance of non-penetrating shots to do their damage in the current model. I believe I’ve seen 3% referenced on some other forum thread, but I’ve not attempted to to verify that it myself.
I’d very much like it if armour and shield penetration weren’t as binary as they are now. Any sort of curve function to let just-below weapons do a bit of damage, and massively above weapons to do more than just above, would be good.
I sort of agree, since a soft counter might be more interesting, but the binary nature of hard counters does make a point about technology: if you haven’t brought the tech you need into the extremely unforgiving environment of space (in combat no less), bend over! 
I tend to agree with Corbeau on this regarding the unforgiving environment of space combat, as we imagine it.
It looks kinda odd though when you got all kinds of shield penetration levels from 30 to 50 when the maximum resistance atm is 27 so it wont make any differance at all.
That is something that could use more mechanical variation. For example, beam penetration is pointless to even look at because it boils down to this: beams can penetrate Frigate shields, and Cruiser shields are impenetrable to beams. Adding more variation to shield resistances would make things more interesting than currently, when it’s really just a question of how many generators you mount in order to get recharge speed. Having lower-damage beams that could penetrate quicker-recharging but lower-resistance shields would add another variable to strategy.
^^^ THIS! Lovely idea, mate!