Does anyone know what the armor and shield penetration modifiers that you get from tech/discoveries actually do? I tested them out and they don't seem to give any sort of penetration modifier to ships, and nowhere do I see the modifiers appear in any of the tooltips.


For example, the Plasma Fields technology gives 20% armor penetration, using this modifier in the mod files: ship_armor_penetration_mult = 0.20

What does this actually do?