While I have not tested this myself, I believe it is a graphical error. An old mod for Entrenchment removed shield mitigation and the author said while it will always show as 15% it was not reducing any damage.

The only way to remove shield mitigation from the infocard is to get rid of shields entirely unfortunately.

Minimum shield mitigation is set in each race's player file...IIRC, setting that to zero and then setting max shield mitigation to zero for each entity will remove it from the infocard....

Hmm, if I do that, does that mean I don't have to change it manually on every ship to zero as well?

In addition, does it work similarly for removing armor, because I know there's a value for that too.

I tried that and I THINK it's working. And the shield mitigation view has stopped entirely.

Now I have a new question:

I want to have some weapons penetrate shielding of one race, but not another.

What I think I could do to simulate that is have the Advent have a lot of shielding, but with 0 mitigation, while the Vasari have very little shielding, but with 90% mitigation.

Then, I would set certain weapons as shield penetrating at 100% like the phase missiles.

Would that make the weapon ignore mitigation, and do 10x damage to the Vasari ship, while damaging the Advent ship normally?

Or would I have to figure something else out?

Oh, okay.

So race A has lots of shields and no mitigation, and is immune to shield piercing.

Race B has weak shields and 90% mitigation.

Weapon Z has 100% Phasing, so it does full damage to race B, but doesn't do anything special to race A?

Mission accomplished?

Is there a way to apply the research at start?

It got fixed a while back.

Alternatively, if the tech method is borked, you can make a passive ability that makes ships invulnerable to shield bypass. This might even be the better way to go, so that weaker ships such as scouts, would be partially or fully vulnerable to shield bypass.