Impenetrable and active armour

[phantomdoodler]

One of my players wants to create a magic shield. They took the armour power with the active con, and then chose the impenetrable pro. Having read through the rules carefully, is this necessary? According to the wording for penetrating, such attacks would normally only ignore passive defences, so having armour active, this would seem to Imply that penetrating attacks would  not affect active armour anyway. If this is the case, active is a powerful con. I am inclined to rule that penetrating attacks ignore the armour power, whether they are active or passive.

[mrstones]

I think you're right.
If he create a magic shield that covers the whole body I would let him buy Force field, but I don't think it is what he's thinking about.
So you can put "Active" as a -0d limitation (sure, it gives a great con against penetrating damage, but if he gets hit by surprise he's gonna be hurt), or rule as you wrote.
IMHO maybe I would prefer put it as a -0d but it depends on how rare or common is Penetrating attack in your campaign.

[phantomdoodler]

By shield he means like captain america, so it will be actively used. He also has uncanny defence, so he gets to use it even against surprise attacks. So really unless I use my ruling, there isn't really much point taking impenetrable.