I figured I should write about my opinion on the damage model.
I love everything about it so far. I love the multiple layers and penetration mechanics, I love the citadel and how truly high power weapons can punch to the heart of a ship for those ouch moments, I love how malfunctions are more prevalent and I love how the angles mechanic gives value to a hull's shape, allowing ships with agressive shapes to truly shine in an assault.
My only suggestion would be in the form of an additional feature. I love multiple ways of damaging a ship, and a realistic way of adding one (and that has precedent in other mods) is through weapons being destroyed and damaging the ship. Prv Starworks has an example of a weapon that causes weapons hit on a target to trigger damage based the weapon type, and TADA/Torchships has an example of a missile weapon that can detonate and become unusable when hit (though both rely on scripts specific to the firing weapon's projectile or the weapon being hit itself).
As examples, missile weapons with ammo left could have a chance of exploding and dealing high damage, energy weapons could spawn a fire dealing damage over time (similar to that REDACTED weapon), ballistic weapons could explode but with much less damage than missiles... Whether different types of damage have different likelihoods of causing these effects (i.e explosive damage being better at it than kinetic), or whether the likelihood of these events is also tied to the type of weapon being hit (i.e ballistic weapons less vulnerable than energy weapons), there's a lot of potential to create more modularity in ship damage and further definition of ships' and weapons' strengths - at least that's what I believe.
That's my selfish pipe-dream suggestion for some far future. I once tried to manually implement code from TADA's Hammer-rack explosion (minus spawning randomly firing missiles) to other weapons and I might actually try again, but that's fairly limited - and I'm bad at modding.
One more, unrelated thing: Whenever I look at your manual, it brings back fond memories of reading the player-made PDF manual for PR:BF2 - another fan-made realism mod for another, old game where modders realized that they had changed so much, that a good old game manual was needed to teach players how everything works.
Rock on
It's certainly not literal to any sort of believable story the player might tell themselves; it *can't* be, and I don't want to sacrifice gameplay in a vain attempt to make it so.