View source for Talk:Reactive Surface Composite/@comment-90.217.129.100-20150221142519

My current but limited experience of the Reactive vs Mirrored dilemma:

If you have very good shields but a smaller ship, mirrored is better to go for. Your shields offer good protection against most things, but lasers will take your shields down fairly easily and leave you vulnerable to damage. A couple of Sidewinders with beam lasers almost shredded me with my massively expensive class A3 shields and reactive armour.

If you have a bigger ship, even powerful lasers won't deal very much damage to you. What you should be more worried about is projectile weapons, both because they can cause more hull damage and because they're''' much''' better at killing subsystems. Reactive will keep you safer.

Your own mileage may vary and it also totally depends whether you're going up against crappy little pirates in some very well policed system or heavily armed military or heavy duty pirates. You should pick a defence against what damages you most, or stick with basic military grade if neither is more dangerous to you than the other.