Off-type Defences are broken.

I created a scenario where a huge ship with 199 mass-driver attack and 84 hitpoints attacks a ship with 14 beam attack, 345 beam-defence and 92 hitpoints.

floor(sqrt(345)) = 18. A ship with 199 attack can expect to do about 100 damage per round, or around 82 damage through the shields. The mass-driver ship should mostly kill the defender in one round, requiring at most two rounds to finish it off. In contrast, the beam ship could only expect to do about 7 damage per round.

Over nine of these one-on-one combats, the defending beam ship won eight! The attacker, with 199 attack and facing *no* matching defence only did about 0-12 damage per round!

What is going on?

Some have suggested that off-type defences aren't degrading. That seems to be fairly consistent with what I'm seeing here. I thikn the attacker was using mass-driver guns with an individual attack rating of 7. Rolling 0-7 against 0-18, even 25 times, would only generate a handful of points of damage.

I created a save-file for the scenario, which I'll send to the bugs email shortly. Once I finish boggling at the results...