You’ve just played through the tutorial and now you’re ready to face the ‘verse!
Unfortunately, not. Fractured space does an awful job of explaining some of core concepts that will keep you alive. Hopefully ECG will fix this, but for now I’m going to try and explain a couple of these to give you a slightly softer landing in your matches.

Every ship has 6 armour facings: top, bottom, front, back, left, right; each with its own health pool. As shown by the armour widget.

A shot that hits armour will only do 75% damage to the hull, your main pool of hit points. It will also deal damage to that armour face and once that armour is gone weapons hitting that face will deal 200% hull damage.

Broken side armour on a Colossus

How can I tell armour is broken? The flashing red bar in the armour widget should be a give away for your own ship. Look for the fire effect on one side of other ships. On enemies, you will get a short lived red pop up saying which face is exposed, and weapon hits on broken armour will cause your crosshair to flash red.



Hopefully you’ve realised that shooting broken armour is the thing to do. Unfortunately, so has the enemy and you’re going to have to get your exposed side out of their line of fire. The simplest solution is to rotate. Use the A and D keys to spin the ship and give them some fresh armour to blast at.

Not all armour is created equal, even on a single ship. Heavies often have significantly stronger armour than lights or mediums that can take a lot more punishment before breaking. On certain ships, you’ll find armour breaks a lot quicker in some areas than others. A great example of this is the Brawler, which has incredibly strong side armour. If you keep pounding away on that you will be concussed and chewed out long before it breaks. However, carefully aiming at its front, back, top or bottom will bring it down in no time.

As a general rule the rear and bottom armour tend to be weakest if there is a difference.

A final thing to say on armour is that some types of damage has no effect on it. AoE and plasma will deal 100% of their damage straight to the hull.
Some weapons will deal extra damage to armour, the Venturer’s stone cracker and Reaper’s scythe beam are good examples that can strip armour in a single hit.

tl;dr Shoot broken armour to do more damage, Turn your ship to stop the enemy shooting your broken armour.

The tutorial helpfully tells you about your 2 jump drives but fails to tell you about the 3s longer jump time it takes to jump home or the 200% damage you take while in jump prep.

So firstly, DO NOT JUMP IN COMBAT. Nothing leads to your death quicker than jumping in front of the enemy team. If you feel you are outnumbered and need to get out, get behind cover before you jump.
On this note, if there is any danger while you are planning on jumping, USE STANDARD JUMP. This only takes 7s to get away from the bloodthirsty sentinel boosting round cover to send you to the scrapheap, whereas Jump Home takes 10s and those 3 extra seconds feel like a long time when missiles are flying. If you do feel safe, use your Jump Home drive. You can then use normal jump immediately when you arrive at home base, reinforcing your allies that bit quicker.

tl;dr Don’t jump in combat, Use normal jump if you are in danger, Jump Home takes longer, Jumping enemies make the best explosions.