TLDR: 4.5 PTU makes “heavily armored” ships feel too squishy. Using real-world small-arms vs AR500 plate as an analogy, and then sanity-checking it with an in game Size 2 Sledge II mass driver, my first linear pass (Edit 1) wrongly suggested S2 had enough energy to fully punch through a Perseus class armor; a better energy-per-area model (Edit 2) shows it’s more like 1/3 of total armor damaged. So small to mid-size weapons can meaningfully damage heavy armor, but they shouldn’t be instant kill buttons: Size-1 to Size-3 should mostly annoy, Size-4 should start to wear armor, and only the big stuff should really chew through thick plating. Right now, mid-tier guns are deleting “armored” hulls much faster than that kind of scaling would imply, and it still feels a lot closer to space magic than to any grounded notion of what armor is supposed to do. I’ve been keeping up with all the 4.5 PTU clips and discussions — and based on what people are showing, I cannot figure out how armor is supposed to work anymore. From everything I’ve seen, Size-3 and Size-4 weapons are absolutely deleting ships that are supposedly “heavily armored.” And in several videos, a medium ship with Size-4/5 guns is ripping through capital-class hulls like they’re made of soggy cereal boxes. Which is… well, let's just say it's not how any kind of armor system should behave if the point of engineering is to increase survivability and give folks a chance to get home. Let me put it in real-world terms; assume ship weapons akin to real world calibers and energy levels as follows: Size 1 = .22LR (~100 ft-lbs) Size 2 = 9mm FMJ (~350 ft-lbs) Size 3 = 5.56/.223 FMJ (~1,200–1,400 ft-lbs) Size 4 = .308/7.62 NATO FMJ (~2,400–2,600 ft-lbs) Size 5 = .300 Win Mag / similar magnums (~3,500–4,500 ft-lbs) Size 6 = .338 Lapua / large magnums (~4,700–6,000+ ft-lbs) Size 7 = .50 BMG / anti-materiel class (10,000–13,000+ ft-lbs) If you take an actual AR500 steel plate — the real stuff used to stop rifle fire — and you hit it with something tiny like .22LR (Size 1)? Nothing happens. You can shoot it a thousand times and the steel still looks at you like, “really?” Move up to 9mm (Size 2)? Still nothing. You’re basically throwing Skittles. Even 5.56/.223 FMJ (Size 3) — a real rifle round — barely affects AR500 unless you stand there dumping magazines into the exact same pin-point spot like you’ve declared war on a square inch of steel. It’s only when you step up to .308/7.62 NATO (Size 4) that the plate starts to show real wear. That’s the first “okay, the armor is actually fatiguing now” threshold. Everything above that — .300 Win Mag (Size 5), .338 Lapua (Size 6), .50 BMG (Size 7) — is where armor actually gets overwhelmed and fails dramatically. Those are your big-ship-tier weapons. In Star Citizen terms: Size 1–3 equivalents shouldn't meaningfully degrade armor. Even hundreds of impacts won’t structurally compromise armor. Size 4 is the first tier where real degradation starts to appear. Size 5–7 would be the weapons powerful enough to do serious or catastrophic damage. If anything, CIG doesn’t need to reinvent armor from scratch. Modern MBT (Main Battle Tank) and naval armor already give perfectly good reference points — even a quick 15-minute search shows the basic “what defeats what” relationships between armor thickness, energy levels, and weapon class. There’s a clear rock-paper-scissors structure in the real world, and Star Citizen could easily borrow that at even the most fundamental level. Nobody expects full realism, but there’s a big difference between balanced fantasy and breaking the basic logic of how armor scales. Hopefully the PTU tuning pass brings things closer to a system that at least respects those tiers. Just a little more care here would go a long way. EDIT It seems some people are missing the point and think I’m actually equating .22LR to a Size 1 ship weapon. I’m not. I’m using an analogy of modern firearms against AR500 steel plate. There’s a reason I included the energy levels of each “size” in that analogy. If you want to scale it up to ship weapons, you can do that with a little math. Possibly oversimplifying and sticking with the analogy: if it takes a “Size 5” round (about 3,500 ft-lbs of energy) to penetrate AR500 steel plate of about 19 mm thickness (typical thickness to "Stop" .308), then how much energy would be needed to penetrate something like the Perseus’s 2 m (2,000 mm) of armor? The Perseus is described as having titanium armor, and titanium is inherently weaker than steel, so we can roughly equate it. Assuming common aerospace titanium Ti-64, it has about 75% of the yield strength of AR500. That makes 2,000 mm of Ti-64 about the same as 1,500 mm of AR500-equivalent armor. So if 3,500 ft-lbs (4.8 kJ) energy is needed to penetrate 19mm of armor, then 276,315 ft-lbs (374.6 kJ) of energy is needed to penetrate 1,500mm of armor (1,500mm/19mm x 3,500 ft-lbs). A Size 2 Sledge II Mass Driver, per Erkul 4.5 PTU values, does 525 alpha damage and fires a 60mm slug at 3,000 m/s (caliber per older CIG materials and tools). To convert this to kJ we need a "conversion factor" for alpha. Let’s assume the slug is similar to a modern 60 mm artillery/naval projectile — roughly 292 mm long (in line with 60 mm HVMS data) and weighing about 3 lb (~1.35 kg) of steel. Therefore the alpha conversion factor for this specific weapon is: 1 alpha = KE / alpha = (1/2 m v^2) / 525 = (1/2 1.35 kg 3,000 m/s ^2) / 525 = 11.6 kJ/alpha So the total energy per shot from a Size 2 Sledge II Mass Driver is 525 alpha = 525 * 11.6 kJ/alpha = 6,075 kJ. Compare that to the ~374.6 kJ back-of-the-napkin requirement to punch through 1,500 mm of AR500-equivalent armor. One Sledge shot is roughly 16x the threshold. Even if other Size 2 weapons only had one-fifth to one-half of the Sledge’s per-shot energy, they’d still be well above the penetration requirement. And this is where I have to own a correction to my initial take. My first take was that only “Size 5+” weapons should really threaten that kind of armor. Once I actually ran the numbers using a 60 mm Sledge II as a reference, it turns out a Size 2 mass driver can absolutely sit in the “serious armor threat” range in this simplified model, and even some other Size 2 guns could plausibly damage sub-capital armor like the Perseus. I was wrong on my initial take, the math changed my mind slightly - smaller size ship based weapons CAN damage armor. However, it really should be more a death by a thousand cuts rather than armor/hull getting chewed through instantly - not pure invulnerability but at least some semblance of resistance. EDIT 2 One important correction that someone rightly pointed out: In the math above, I treated armor penetration as if it scaled linearly with thickness - if 19 mm needs 3,500 ft-lbs, then 1,500 mm just needs (1,500 / 19) × 3,500 ft-lbs. That’s not how real penetration physics works. Real world armor models use non-linear relationships. As armor gets thicker, each extra millimeter buys you more than a linear amount of extra protection, and simply cranking up projectile energy does not give you linear gains in penetration. In other words - My 19 mm AR500 Plate to 1,500 mm Perseus AR500 equivalent linear scaling is overly generous to the attacking weapon. A realistic model would make 1,500 mm of AR500-equivalent armor far tougher than my simple linear ratio suggests. The true physics is messy and complicated - I’m not gonna do all that math. I’m stepping back to a simpler, first-order linear approach that better scales with size and energy - more so than the previous energy vs thickness. The idea is straightforward: to punch through armor, a projectile has to do work on a column of material in front of it. For similar materials and impact conditions, the thickness you can defeat is roughly proportional to how much energy per unit area (E/A) you’re dumping into that column. This isn’t a full De-Marre penetration model, but using energy per unit area naturally accounts for projectile size and gives a more scalable approximation than my earlier linear thickness/energy ratio. Using my "Size 5" .300 Winmag (3,500 ft-lbs or 4.8 kJ) needed to punch through 19mm of AR500 plate as the energy per area baseline: .300 Winmag uses 7.82mm bullet diameter leading to 0.074 sq.inch of impact area. So with 4.8 kJ energy delivered on impact that is roughly 64.9 kJ per square inch. So for the Size 2 Sledge II Mass Driver (4,480,690 ft-lbs or 6,075 kJ) using a 60mm diameter slug, delivers about 1,386 kJ per square inch which is about 21.5 greater energy per unit area than the .300 Wing Mag. Therefore, in the simple E/A model, the Size 2 Sledge II Mass Driver can penetrate up to 409mm of AR500 armor (19mm x 21.5) - well below the 1,500mm AR500 equivalent armor of the Perseus. But it does punch through about 1/3 the armor therefore my takeaway from Edit 1 still stands: However, it really should be more a death by a thousand cuts rather than armor/hull getting chewed through instantly - not pure invulnerability but at least some semblance of resistance.