Walt My current thinking is that a shield has a base penetration resistance value (say, 15) and the actual penetration subtracted from the bullet is multiplied by the percentage of health the shield had remaining.
I think that sounds reasonable (no idea on the base resist value). Should this also apply to armor and other parts, or is that unnecessary?
Walt Most bullets would not go through shields even if their penetration is higher than 15 unless they also do enough damage to take down the shield
To keep things consistent, why not allow all weapons to penetrate if the shield is weak enough? For cannons to penetrate and deal meaningful damage, the shield would need to be very, very weak already. I can't imagine this having any significant balance effect, but it would keep penetration acting consistently across all weapons.
nop Not ideal in the spirit of modular weapons, but not unbalanced either.
Agreed, it's not a balance issue. But I also agree that it definitely is against the spirit of modular weapons. Right now IMO there are only 2 useable railgun lengths, and basically no reason to build any different length. I feel like it's also very unintuitive and makes railguns difficult to use in combination with other weapons.
nop What you're proposing is still binary: either your railgun is long enough to break a shield and do some damage to things behind it or it is not.
Far less so. Right now a single accelerator is the difference between breaking 1 9/10 shields and dealing 0 part damage, vs breaking 2 shields and 1-shotting dozens of rooms beyond. After penetration changes, a single accelerator difference would be between 1 9/10 shields and 0 part damage vs 2 shields and barely any part damage.
nop Either railguns get more expensive to do the same damage or cheaper railguns one-shot all the shields.
Not necessarily. I think it would depend on how much penetration resistance shields get, and what stats the railgun ends up having. If shields have high enough penetration resistance, railguns will still be just as bad vs them as they are now. Ideally I think that railguns would feel pretty much the same after the penetration changes, just without any crucial breakpoints to design around.