Combat Damage Math

Ship combat only. On-foot damage is a different system (see The Ground Game). Thargoid combat is a third system (see Thargoid and AX).

• Two health bars. Shields (MJ) go first, then hull (HP).
• Shields resist bullets, hull resists lasers. So bring both. Lasers strip shields, kinetics chew hull.
• Resistance is a discount. 30% resistance means a damage multiplier of 0.7.
• Raw strength and resistance are the same thing. 100 HP at 50% resistance equals 200 HP at 0%.
• Resistances multiply, they do not add. Three 10% mods give 27.1%, not 30%.
• Stop stacking resistance around 50 to 60%. Past that, diminishing returns halve your gains. Switch to Heavy Duty.
• Hull has a second gate: hardness vs piercing. Small guns lose most of their damage against big ships.
• Plasma Accelerators are 60% absolute. Absolute ignores all resistance. That is why they are the PvP weapon.
• Your distributor is the real DPS cap. Paper DPS means nothing if WEP runs dry.

Shields absorb everything until they break. Then damage goes to hull. Think of it as a raincoat over armor. Different things get through each one.

A railgun is not absolute damage. People confuse this constantly. Railguns win on piercing and precision, not on bypassing resistance.

Read those minus signs carefully. Negative means you take more. Shields (all generator types) and hull (by bulkhead).

• Lasers melt shields. Bullets chew hull. Shields are +40% kinetic and -20% thermal. Standard hull is 0% thermal and -20% kinetic. The systems are mirror images on purpose.
• That is why a single-damage-type build stalls halfway through every fight.

Stop thinking in percentages. Think in multipliers. That is how the game calculates it. Formula: `Multiplier = 1 - Resistance`

100 shields with 50% resistance is the same as 200 shields with no resistance. That combined figure is Effective HP. It is the only defensive number worth comparing. `Effective HP = Raw HP / Damage Multiplier`

Identical in a fight. This is why "which shield is bigger" is the wrong question. Effective HP is damage-type specific. A ship can have 3,000 effective MJ against kinetic and 1,800 against thermal. Check the weakest one, because that is the one your enemy will use.

• Three modules at 10% resistance each do not give 30%.
• Damage multipliers stack multiplicatively: `0.9 x 0.9 x 0.9 = 0.729`. That is 27.1% resistance, not 30%.
• Each module works on what is left, not on the original number.

Past a threshold, the game takes the resistance below that threshold and cuts it in half. Formally: damage multipliers in the range [0, cap] get remapped to [0.5 x cap, cap].

• The remapping can help you. If your multiplier sits between 0.7 and your diminishing-returns start point, a mod that should lower your resistance can leave you better off than the plain math suggests.
• One documented case: a build that "should" have had 45.83% thermal resistance actually had 48.7%.
• Do not try to exploit this. Just know that EDSY and Coriolis handle it and your mental math will not.

Shields do not have this. Hull does, and it is brutal. Every ship has an Armour Hardness rating you cannot change with outfitting or engineering. Every weapon has an Armour Piercing rating set by its type and size. This happens before resistances. It is a separate, earlier cut.

• `If Piercing >= Hardness: full damage`
• `If Piercing < Hardness: damage x (Piercing / Hardness)`
• This is why small guns feel useless against big ships. It is not your imagination. You are losing most of your damage before the resistance math starts.
• Railguns and Plasma Accelerators always deal 100% against every hull, because the highest hardness in the game is 75 and they both pierce at 100.

Note the Fer-de-Lance at 70. A medium ship with more hardness than an Anaconda. Small does not always mean soft.

Known multi-cannon values: size 1 = 22, size 2 = 37, size 4 = 68. A size 1 multi-cannon against a Krait Mk II: 22 / 55 = 0.4. You deal 40% of your damage before resistances are even applied. The Cytoscrambler against anything: 1.33 to 5% of its damage. Near useless against hulls, by design. It is an anti-shield weapon only.

Corrosive does not touch resistances. It lowers the target's hardness. It reduces the target's armour hardness by about 20 points for the duration. That size 1 multi-cannon against a Krait goes from 22/55 = 40% up to 22/35 = 63%. More than half again as much damage, on every gated weapon you carry.

Putting Corrosive on a railgun or plasma is a wasted experimental. This is a very common build mistake. The right move: one small multi-cannon with High Capacity plus Corrosive. It costs you almost nothing and buffs every gated weapon on the ship.

Absolute damage ignores resistances. Shield resistance, hull resistance, all of it. Skipped. This is why Plasma Accelerators are the PvP meta.

All that resistance stacking your opponent spent weeks engineering? Most of it does not apply. Pair that with 100 piercing and a plasma does nearly its full listed damage to almost anything. The defensive counter: there is none, other than raw effective HP and not getting hit. Against plasma, Heavy Duty beats Resistance Augmented every time.

Most experimentals tweak numbers. These change which rules apply.

Incendiary is the sneaky one. Module builds that list "Overcharged plus Incendiary" on multi-cannons are building an anti-shield loadout, not an anti-hull one. If you wanted hull damage, leave the rounds kinetic.

You can carry the best guns in the game and still do nothing. Firing drains the WEP capacitor on your power distributor. Empty capacitor means your weapons fire slower or stop entirely. This is the gap between paper DPS and real DPS.

Worst offenders: Beam Lasers and Plasma Accelerators. A beam laser on a small distributor runs dry in seconds. Check this before you add another hardpoint. A fourth gun you cannot power is worse than three you can.

Every weapon has a damage falloff range and a maximum range.

• Inside falloff: full damage.
• Between falloff and max: damage tapers toward zero.
• Past max: nothing.
• Long Range engineering pushes falloff out to the maximum range. That is its entire job. It does not add damage. It stops you losing damage.
• Example: the Advanced Plasma Accelerator has a falloff range of 2,000 m and a maximum of 3,500 m.

When a shot gets through to hull, it can damage specific internal modules based on where it hit.

• The chance of a breach depends entirely on your remaining hull points. A healthy hull rarely breaches. A hull at 20% breaches constantly, which is how a losing fight turns into a lost one.
• Module Reinforcement Packages (MRP) reduce module damage.
• Keeping your hull high in the first place is a defense.

The order the game actually runs it in:

1. 1Weapon base damage
2. 2x engineering modifiers (Overcharged, Efficient, etc.)
3. 3x range falloff
4. 4Split into damage types. PA = 60% absolute / 20% thermal / 20% kinetic. Rail = 50% thermal / 50% kinetic.
5. 5HULL ONLY: x (Piercing / Hardness), capped at 1.0
6. 6x damage multiplier per type. ABSOLUTE SKIPS THIS STEP
7. 7Damage lands
8. 8Possible module breach, based on remaining hull

Real numbers showing the math in action.

• Fix the negatives first. Shields start at -20% thermal and hull starts at -20% kinetic and -40% explosive. You are digging out of a hole before you gain anything.
• Thermal Resistant on the shield generator, not just boosters. It raises the diminishing-returns threshold for the whole build.
• Stop at 50 to 60%, then switch to Heavy Duty.
• Compare effective HP, never raw MJ.
• Check your weakest damage type. That is what a smart opponent will bring.
• Military Grade Composite is the safe default. Mirrored and Reactive are specialist picks with real downsides.
• Nothing defends against plasma but raw HP.

• Bring two damage types. One laser family for shields, one kinetic family for hull. A single-type build stalls halfway through every kill.
• Match weapon size to target size, or bring Corrosive.
• One small multi-cannon with High Capacity plus Corrosive is the best single utility hardpoint in the game.
• Never put Corrosive on a railgun or plasma.
• Know that Incendiary flips multi-cannons to thermal.
• Check the distributor before adding a fourth gun.
• Plasma and railguns ignore the hardness gate. If you like fixed weapons, they solve your small-gun problem permanently.

• Negative resistance means you take MORE damage. Minus 20% thermal is a 1.2x multiplier.
• Railguns are not absolute damage. They are 50/50 thermokinetic, and both halves get resisted.
• Hull hardness cannot be engineered. It is fixed per ship model, forever.
• The hardness gate applies to hull only. Shields do not care about piercing.
• Corrosive is a hardness debuff, not a resistance debuff.
• Lightweight, Reinforced, and Military armor have identical resistances. Only hull points differ.
• Mirrored armor at -75% kinetic is a liability in a Resource Extraction Site full of multi-cannons.
• On-foot combat is a different system. Ship plasma is 60% absolute. On-foot plasma is balanced against both shields and health. Do not carry the mental model across.
• Thargoid combat is a third system. See Thargoid and AX.
• Let the tools do the math. EDSY and Coriolis handle the remapping correctly. Your mental arithmetic will not.