How does armor work in Solar Echoes? (part 1)

In a large number of RPG's, armor prevents your character from being hit altogether. The higher your armor quality, the harder it is to injure you. However, in Solar Echoes, we view armor differently. Armor is protection that reduces damage if you are hit, but being hit is a function of whether you dodged the attack or not. For instance, regardless of a character's armor, an attack against the character must be better (more accurate) than the character's dodge roll. If the attack is successful, the damage is then first absorbed by the armor before penetrating to the character. However, armor also has hardness, which depletes as it absorbs damage. A standard suit of combat armor has 20 hardness, so if an attack doing 4 ballistic damage hits a character with combat armor (which protects against 2 damage), 2 damage will get through to the character, while 2 is absorbed by the armor, reducing the armor to 18 hardness from 20. Once the hardness of a suit of armor has been depleted to 0, the armor no longer absorbs damage and all damage goes straight through to the character.