As most of you already know, the way that Railguns interact with shields is a bit odd in that Railguns do very little damage (for their cost) if they can't pierce the shield, but if they can pierce the shield then they do their full penetration damage. This makes railguns with 7 or fewer accelerators much less useful than a railgun with 8 accelerators. (And a railgun with 25 accelerators is a lot less useful than one with 26, which can pierce 2 shields.)
I've made a spreadsheet that clearly shows this. It shows the expected total damage (shield damage + physical damage) for when a railgun of any given length hit s a ship with 0, 1, or 2 shields. As you can see, the 0-shield damage has a nice smooth gradient, but the 1-shield damage has a big jump between 7 accelerators and 8 accelerators, and the 2-shield damage has a big jump between 25 and 26.
I think it would be better if there was a smoother damage gradient regardless of whether the ship has shields or not, without making shields useless against railguns.
A possible solution to this problem was discussed in this thread. To summarize, shields would be given a penetration resistance such that a railgun (or any other penetrating weapon) with a high enough penetration strength would be able to pierce the shield. However, any subsequent damage done would then be reduced proportionally to the amount of penetration it lost penetrating the shield. (This general principle would apply to all weapons penetrating anything, not just shields.)
The practical effect of this is that an 8-accelerator railgun will have very little penetration remaining after piercing a shield and thus its total damage won't be hugely higher than a 7-accelerator railgun.
Of course, making this change without buffing the railgun's base stats would result in a massive nerf (more than 80% total damage reduction for an 8-accelerator railgun), which I think we can all agree would be bad. And so the base stats would need some pretty huge buffs to make up for it.
I made another spreadsheet that shows the expected damage using the new penetration logic and allows you to experiment with different values for the railgun (you'll need to make your own copy of the spreadsheet in order to change anything).
As an experiment, I increased anti-shield damage 3600->7500, impact damage 3600->10000, and penetration damage 300->600 (which is needed to keep total penetration damage the same because penetration damage gets reduced as it penetrates). The shield's penetration resistance is auto-calculated to be 12, which is just high enough to make sure the railgun can never penetrate the shield without also doing enough damage to deplete it.
As you can see from the spreadsheet, this would be a pretty big buff to railguns against non-shielded ships, especially for short railguns, which is probably a good thing. It's also a huge buff for railguns with fewer than 8 accelerators vs 1-shielded ships and railguns with fewer than 26 accelerators vs 2-shielded ships. But it's a modest nerf for longer railguns.
Overall I think that the total damage numbers look pretty reasonable, though I'm concerned that due to decreasing damage as it penetrates, it makes the railgun more of a raw damage weapon that's good against surface parts and possibly less useful against internal parts.
What are your thoughts?
