I have a somewhat nit picky question about how the shield mitigation of torpedo damage works. I understand (or at least have read) that "shield damage reduces torpedo damage to 25%" but how specifically does this work? Rather than trying to describe the various scenarios I could foresee, let me make an example and someone knowledgeable can tell me which is correct. (My understanding is the Shield Power/500 damage resistance does not stack onto this 25% torpedo damage, if it does please correct me)

I fire a torpedo at a target which will do 4000 damage. The target has 100 shield remaining.

1.) 400 (400*0.25=100) of the damage will be used to smash the shield, and the remaining 3600 (4000-400) will be applied to the hull.
2.) As soon as the torpedo hits the shield, its damage potential is reduced to 1000 (4000*0.25). 100 of that is used to smash the shield and the remaining 900 (1000-100) will be applied to the hull.
3.) Because the torpedo detonated on the shield, the 1000 (4000*0.25) damage will smash the shield but the hull is unaffected.

Thanks for your time.

i have no idea, i use transpgasics oooo shiney!

This one.

Never bothered to check, to be honest, since when I'm testing SDR related stuff, I just look at energy weapon figures since it means one less math step. But should be easy enough to tell. A shield hit starts out with XXX (YYY). If XXX is always 25% of YYY, then it doesn't. But if it is smaller than that, then the kinetic damage reduction is handled separately from normal SDR.

Oh, and shield_power/500 isn't accurate past somewhere around 25. By 51, it is closer to (shield_power - 50)/500.

Are you joking here or typo? This implies your shield damage resistance would be greater on a power setting of 25 than 50.

Not joking. 125 shield power is not the 25% SDR people assume it is at 51.

And 50 shield power is 0% SDR at 51, possibly even slightly less. With 25 power, if the formula holds, it would be -5%, which is less than 0%, not greater. A hit for 1000 would do 1050 damage to your shields.

Now, I've never tested it at 25, cannot be bothered to respec to do that, even by copying to Tribble. But I can tell you that my carrier with 50 shield power according to the UI was seeing hits like 1003 (1000). My shield power setting was actually causing me to take extra damage to shields. Just a tiny amount, but it was there. The (####) only gets added when SDR is present (and that is pretty much always now). And the only thing impacting my SDR was power level. So with a low enough power setting, it can indeed cause you to take extra damage.

But up to level 20, 50 shield power was providing a 10% SDR benefit. And the last time I checked on the current character I'm leveling, at level 25, it wasn't providing that anymore, was around 9.5%. I plan on seeing how the numbers are at 30 and 31 (to see if tier impacts it or just level), but I've been busy playing DCUO, so haven't leveled my KDF engineer in a bit.

People just tend to assume things about SDR without actually testing them. The amount given by certain levels of power is one of those things. The other is that SDR is additive (40% buff + 25% buff = 65% SDR), which also isn't the case, it is actually multiplicative (40% +25% provides 55% SDR).

Well its not that people do not test stuff, is that people use whatever info was given. In the change log which made shield power do some dmg reduction, there was clearly the 125/5 info, if im not mistaken.

To the question as to why a torpedo damage is lost when only 100 points of shield is left and the torpedo does 4,000; it has to deal with the system maintaining shield resistance when the shield is gone. Since shields have a natural 75% resist to kinetic, it works out like this:

For the bleedthrough:

10% bleedthrough is subtracted from the hit:
4,000 * 0.1 = 400 Bleedthrough damage
3,600 points of damage left for the next stage
NOTE: Resiliant shields discard 50% of bleedthrough, basically:
400 * 0.5 = 200 (Resiliant only)

For the Shield Hit at 75% resistance:

1.0 (100%) - 0.75 (75%) = 0.25 (25%) damage left after resistance.
3,600 * 0.25 = 900 points of damage to the shields.
900 - 100 points of shield facing = 800 damage and no more shield facing.

CURRENTLY that 800 is left untouched. If it were restored to pre-resistance values:
800/0.25 = 3,200 (Not currently done in game)

And the Hull Hit:

400 (Bleedthrough) + 800 (Post-Shields) = 1,200
30% of the original hit, a reduction of 70%
Or:
200 (Bleedthrough) + 800 (Post-Shields) = 1,000 (Resiliant Only)
25% of the original hit, a reduction of 75%

IF we reverse the shield resistance before applying to the hull:

400 (Bleedthrough) + 3,200 (Post-Shields) = 3,600
90% of the original hit, a reduction of 10%
Or:
200 (Bleedthrough) + 3,200 (Post-Shields) = 3,500 (Resiliant Only)
87.5% of the original hit, a reduction of 12.5%

Take note, this assumes you have no hull kinetic resist. But if you had 25% hull resist, you would need to multiply the final hull hit value with 0.75.

Results from my tests indicate that bleed through is calculated before any damage reduction is applied.

Luckily, else torpedoes would do close to no bleedthrough.

If you followed my math, you would see I calculated bleed through first, without shield mitigation.