an 1100 Build Point ship will cost 1100 minerals
That's not strictly true. Maintenance Storage Bays require no
vespene gas minerals. I'm sure there are other ship components, perhaps even installations or other things, with costs that don't quite match.
Damage patters is lasers dig deep going roughly 1/2 as deep as the total damage your shot inflicts. Railguns, carronades, and particle beams all have cone shaped damage templates that have the damage penetrating roughtly 1/3 as deep as the total damage per shot. Obviously big lasers can get through even heavy armour very quicklly. Where the other weapons need more hits to penetrate in general.
Missiles and plasma penetrate the next level of armor at each perfect square of damage (1, 4, 9, 16, ...). Lasers reach the nth level of armor, where IIRC n = sqrt( 3 x damage ). Everything else hits the sqrt( 2 x damage ) = nth level of armor. This is all integer math, so round everything down to the nearest integer. The game uses damage templates rather than a formula, but those should tell you the max penetration for a given weapon. Steve and others have posted those templates before, so run a search if you're curious.
Also, don't forget that actual penetration will be less than calculated, since actual damage drops off with range for everything but particle beams and missiles.
Side note: Physically, I don't see why slug (e.g. gauss, railgun) damage drops over beam range in vaccuum. Beam range is only 1.4m km max, after all, and a slug won't diffuse like beams (e.g. laser) or plasma. Not if it's solid, anyway. I suppose they could be molten or whatever due to friction, which might partially explain their poor range multipliers (gauss max x6, railgun max x9, compared to laser/meson/microwave max x12).