Is there a master list of ships somewhere I can use to do some data crunching with? I started making my own but it's... painful. I can keep at it if needed but if it's already out there somewhere, or if I'm able to extract it from one of the files, even better.
Actually, the game itself is capably of exporting a nice spreadsheet with all of this -- just hit F3 to bring up the general debug menu, and then I think it's Shift+Ctrl+F8 or something like that. The controls document mentions it as "export excel secondaries." It's exporting that data from the actual game values, so as we change things in the game it's always able to export something exactly up to date, rather than it having to be a repository that someone maintains by hand (quite a task, as you've seen!).
While we're on the topic, maybe someone can help me understand the idea behind how the Mirror is setup.
If inbound shots do 10x damage, doesn't that basically negate the armor stat? Wouldn't it make more sense to make the mirror have 154,000 hp, same armor, have it give out 1/10 the damage of incoming shots, and allow it to absorb at least a little of the AoE and Missile Damage?
Remember that the mirror deals back out mirror damage shots equal to the incoming damage. I don't remember the specific interplay of this now (it's been a while, and we changed it many, many times), but the general idea -- I think -- is that the mirrors are taking in X damage from an attacker and then sending X*10 damage back to that same attacker. But the mirror only winds up taking X damage. Meanwhile, if the attacker has armor-piercing, then the attacker can do X damage to the mirror and then still takes X*10 back (but at least they did far more damage to the mirror.
Speaking more broadly, the reasoning behind a lot of that is that most ship types are poor at attacking themselves, so for the mirrored shots to matter much they have to be numbers-inflated. But by the same token, the mirrors need some sort of weakness, so hence stuff that is armor-piercing fits the bill nicely under this system.
EDIT: ninja'd!