I'm not really sure if I even have a question here. I kinda want to just talk about this.

So looking at materials that vanilla actors are usually made of, you tend to mostly see Flesh, Armored Flesh, and Military Stuff. Now, obviously the big number that determines how easily penetrated a material is is StructualIntegrity. Those above materials I just listed have SI values of 30, 40, and 80 respectively. In general, military Stuff tends to be used for armor and robotic parts, Armored Flesh tends to be used for parts covered in any kind of heavy kevlar-like not-quite-metal stuff, and flesh is just for bare flesh that may or may not be covered by ineffective fabric.

Now, you think that there'd be a significant difference between Flesh and Armored Flesh, to where one could design an MOPixel projectile that could penetrate Flesh but bounce off of Armored Flesh. God help me I tried, but I FAILED MISERABLY. No matter how minutely I fiddled around with the sharpness and mass, the projectile seemed to penetrate either both or neither.

This feels like horsecrap. Certainly there should be a bigger gradient between flesh and armored flesh. Between Armored Flesh and Military Stuff, there's a 40 point difference, which does seem to count for something since you can DEFINITELY make a round that penetrates Armored Flesh but not Military Stuff. But the 10-point difference between Flesh and Armored Flesh seems to negate any chance of really making a round that's more effective against flesh than it is against Armored Flesh. They both practically act like the same material in that regard.

This makes things kinda difficult for a guy who wants to make projectiles that balance well against vanilla units, in interesting ways.

I've also been thinking the same about the fleshes, and the only "good" solution that I came to was changing the structural integrity of it when placing the CopyOf, usually to something like 50 or 55.

I didn't like it as a solution anyway, but it kinda makes the difference.

Well that only works when designing my own units. It's my weapons interacting with vanilla units that's the problem. I can't really have my mod modify base materials or vanilla actors. And I do want to balance my mod with vanilla. Sure they're probably more powerful than vanilla, but they're also supposed to be expensive elite units, so I still want to balance things accordingly.

Yeah, that sucks.

Balancing modded content with vanilla content is very hard, specially in your case.

Well, if you look at soldiers today, they don't have kevlar on every part of their body, so I think that the lack of a significant difference between Flesh and Armored Flesh doesn't really matter.

Why not just make a round that penetrates Military Stuff the way you would want it to penetrate through Armored Flesh, and then when it gets down to the Flesh/Armored Flesh make it react like you would want it to react with regular old Flesh?

In theory you should be able to use the equations mentioned here to calculate a sharpness that penetrates slightly more than 1.0 pixel of Flesh and slightly less than 1.0 pixels of Armored Flesh.