Use the top config strip to choose Your Ship (the attacker) and the Target (whoever you're trying to kill). If you opened this page from the Loadout Bay, your current loadout auto-loads. Otherwise it uses the ship's default weapons.

The four big numbers in the TTK strip are your time-to-kill at each phase of a fight:

• Shields down — when their shields collapse completely
• Armor down — when you've burned through shields and armor
• Hull zero — full destruction (usually takes a lot longer)
• Soft death — ~75% hull gone, the practical kill. Core systems fail and the ship is effectively dead.

Soft death is the number you care about most in actual combat.

Each row on the right is a weapon (identical weapons are grouped as ×N). Click one and it expands to show the full damage chain — a shot-by-shot breakdown of how one hit travels through the target:

• ALPHA — raw damage leaving the barrel
• SHIELD — how much the shields absorb
• ARMOR — how much the armor soaks after shields
• HULL — actual structural damage that sticks
• COMP — component penetration (components take extra stress)

If a stage shows ✕, the shot got deflected — the weapon isn't doing enough damage per shot to punch through that layer at all. This happens with small guns against big ships.

The shield and armor sliders in the top target section let you model a fight-in-progress — drag them down to simulate a target whose shields are already at 30%, for example. The TTK numbers and chain results update instantly.

The Mitigation panel (right side) shows the target's resistances. A positive % means they take less of that damage type. A negative % means they're vulnerable — they take more. Pick weapons that match the target's biggest vulnerability for the fastest kill.

The Comparison Loadout section lets you add hypothetical weapons and see how they'd perform against the same target. Toggle Use for sim to run the chain and TTK against your comparison loadout instead. Great for planning a fit before you commit.