I thought this was on the list to fix a long time ago. I'll send out an inquiry seeing why it's still this way.

You're right - there's a bug in the loot table.

It's 100% at full armor and 25% at zero armor, and it lerps between the two... but armor can only absorb damage if you have armor left. So it's the former example you listed, except it's more like 25.000001% absorbed at 0.00001% armor.

Very handy tool, this. Double-click on the little eyedropper and it will open up a color picker.

No, they cannot. It's possible you'll see a gunboat that can be used in PvP.

That would end up the same as removing movement penalties and relying only on defense. The main issue there is it means that small ships wouldn't have improved target tracking to help them hit other small ships.

That would require code and take much longer to implement a change.

Hi ZZZ, have you gone through the steps at the end of Answer 36 on the support site, and filed a support ticket with the information from step 5?

JScharF, have you checked if your network is using a Packeteer or similar traffic-shaping appliance? It sounds like you saying it is, since you're mentioning bandwidth just for the given port range. Even if your firewall allows you to make connections on the appropriate ports, a packet-shaper might be throttling or even killing your connection. Information about our progress with Packeteer can be found in this thread.

Let's try to keep this thread civil, shall we?

Oddible, please take another look at answer #36 on support.flyinglab.com, we've recently updated it. If the game runs fine for you, but you get the initial message about UDP, try the pirates_local.ini fix mentioned in that article - you're already falling back to TCP-only, the setting will simply make the game not try UDP first, which should speed things up for you.