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[CDN]Steel_Ice said:
...in battle if the sheids are penetrated then I get either no damage or "reverse damage" and I dont mean that the sheilds are replenished but that if I get any actual hull damaged it is reversed when my ship takes another hit, is this intended or is it a bug?
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This is intended. It is how the crystalline armor ability (Shield Generation From Damage) ability functions. This ability is the key feature of a "leaky shielding" system, where the goal of shielding is not to provide a magic wall that offers 100% protection until the moment that the shield level hits 0, then nothing at all, as in stock SE4. Instead, the shielding has the overall net affect of allowing some shots to damage the ship, but others will be stopped. Thus, some damage "leaks" through, in classic Star Trek style. The only way to do this in SE4 is to use the crystalline armor ability, which functions precisely as you have seen it function. It causes shield points to be added to the shield layer for each point of damage done to the hull, up to the maximum allowed by the ability levels of your armor/shields/whatever.
Unfortunately, partial damage is not stored on a per component basis. Instead, any remaining damage (that was not enough to destroy an entire component) is added to the next incoming shot. Normally, this process is not really visible. Each shot just damages more components. It does not make much difference overall that that extra 5 damage points are added to the incoming 65, since it will all end up doing the same sort of damage to the ship anyways. Note that this can cause some odd effects with special damage weapons. If you had, say, 20 points of partial damage remaining from an Anti-Proton Beam hit, and the next hit is with an Ionic Disperser (engine damaging), then that 20 points of partial damage are transformed into engine damage, adding directly to the damage of the ID. This can either cause the ID to destroy more engines than it normally would, or it can cause that 20 stored partial damage from the APB to be lost (special damage weapons, which damage only a specific type of component, do not accumulate partial damages; they either destroy an entire component (or more), or do nothing). But I digress...
With Shield Generation From Damage components in play, the stored partial damage must get through the shield layer again (as the shot that created that partial damage also resulted in the generation of shield points). Against crystalline armored/leaky shield protected ships, damage per shot becomes very, very important. You have to be able to destroy whole components in a single shot, else you won't get anywhere very fast...