So will this book have an explanation (even just a sidebar) explaining how shields and armor are meant to be envisioned in this game? As in, shields are typically this bubble around your ship and armor is usually on the surface of the ship. But the manner in which attack rolls are adjudicated implies the reverse.

For example, if an attack roll is successful, then the incoming laser beam (or whatever weapon you like) has hit me despite the distance, speed, maneuverability, size, electronic countermeasures, and my own ship's armor. That is to say, we have at this point definitively determined how effective my ship's armor was against this shot (in this case, not enough). The ship's armor has physically interacted with the laser beam. And yet, after the ship's armor has had its opportunity to do its job, then we look to see what the shields will do. The shields that the laser beam already had to interact with or pass by before it ever got to the armor in the first place.

This would be akin to running a dungeon where you first run the final battle against the lich in the final boss room, and then running the battle against the guards outside to see if the party could have even reached the lich. It's out of order and does not make sense.

So what are we supposed to take this as, from an in-universe perspective? Does an incoming laser beam hit the ship, tear through the armor, and then somehow teleport back outside to be absorbed by the shields or not before teleporting back into the ship to continue doing its damage? Does the ship's computer just plot all incoming potentially-damaging effects (no matter how obscure, alien, or unique) and unfailingly determine whether the ship's armor can withstand it, only turning the shields on in the cases where the ship's armor isn't enough? Do Starfinder ships hold all their armor in tractor beams physically separate from the ship's hull and outside the shield bubble? Was the word "shield" just a really poor choice of term, where it's supposed to be more like a structural integrity field?