First of all, thank you for this great mod. It's become mandatory for me. I only wish that I had discovered it sooner.

One of the many things I like about your mod is that it associates armor penetration with the cartridge rather than the weapon. In the vanilla game, it didn't make much sense that the AK-74 was basically the only weapon with medium penetration (other than the M82 and Gold Fever).

However, I do have a question about why 5.56 has medium penetration. I can understand why 7.62 NATO was given medium penetration, but I'm having a harder time understanding why that is also the case for 5.56, especially when 7.62 WP retained light penetration.

With both 5.56 and 7.62 NATO being able to penetrate Kevlar armor, there's less to differentiate them. 7.62 NATO has higher damage, of course, but at the cost of higher recoil (another feature of your mod that I really like) and lower magazine capacities.

At first glance, it would seem like intermediate cartridges like 5.56 (and including 5.45x39mm from various mods) would have light penetration while full-power rifle cartridges like 7.62 NATO (and including 7.62x54mmR) would have medium penetration.

Perhaps this was a balancing decision based on one of the many armor mods? (I haven't used any of them yet.)

Or perhaps it's because the armor penetrating ammunition type can't make critical hits (another interesting feature)? Even though 5.56 (and 5.45) in your mod have interesting critical hit characteristics, I still think that it would be an acceptable trade-off to lose that capability in order to use armor penetrating ammunition to defeat medium armor. And many mid/late-game enemies still have unarmored body parts, so there's that option if you want to try for critical hits with standard or hollow point ammunition.