is penetration under powered as a weapon addon?

[racs333]

so i was looking through to find the weapons, and i was looking particularly at the artillery laser asimuth, its a tier 1 weapon (page 177), penetrating ignores hardness equal to the tier of the weapon, now i refer to the hardness table... on 410, glass, is hardness 1, with 1 hp. a weapon that does 1d10 and 1d6 burn, and the penetration cant go through even ice (hardness 3) or plastic (hardness 8) you need to get at least a tier 3 version just to get past a wall of plastic, in fact, in order for a weapon to be effective you need to buy the largest artillery laser thats level 20, which is equal to ordinary steel. adamantium is 30 so a penetrating laser is essentialy effectively a ordinary over powered flashlight vs hardness. the idea of penetrating is to take down bunkers. at the first few models it wont penetrate a wood or plastic wall. does anyone else notice this inconcistancy? thoughts? should be weapon tier x 2 or 3 imo at the least.

[technarken]

Think of it more as a "+Item level to Damage vs anything with Hardness"

[racs333]

is it damage plus item tier vs hardness, or is it ignores hardness vs item level. becuase it seems like the way the rule is written.

[racs333]

A penetrating weapon is designed to punch through large objects’
outer layers, making it easier to damage them. A penetrating
weapon ignores an amount of hardness equal to the weapon’s level.

[Potestas]

Penetrating is actually good for energy weapons as energy types are affected doubly by hardness. So, assuming a tier three weapon against a wood door you would normally subtract 10 from it's damage for hardness 5, but with penetrating you would subtract 4 as if the door was hardness 2.

EDIT: I'm not actually sure if hardness still applies twice against energy damage

[Ikiry0]

I can't find anything about hardness applying twice vs energy.

But yeah, Penetrating seems kinda meh as most creatures have Damage Reduction rather than Hardness if they are stuff you fight. It's main use seems to be 'Shooting vehicles' but that's a very edge case use for weapons with surprisingly mediocre range increments.

[Xenocrat]

Now that Alien Archive is out, we can continue to say that Penetrating is a bit "meh" as a weapon attribute. Only one monster in this book (the AHAV robot) has Hardness as a defense, and from the core rulebook we only have the Battle Junkbot created by the spell of the same name. So unless you blow up lots of vehicles and doors this isn't a very useful attribute.