In general weapons and armor seem to be pretty off kilter with weapons not being able to even approach armour values and armour not seeming to do anything in autoresolve.

also training might come into play, but I cannot do any better training than normal no matter the tech, so it could be a combat system thing.

I recall them being pretty heavy. Maybe that first swing is fast, but trying to turn it around the other way is probably going to be slow, unless you are really strong... um.. that was off topic though. I'm actually getting the impression that armor -isn't- too high. I had an armor rating 64 character die to an attack rating 25 monster. I'm pretty sure there is some randomness involved in armor that isn't being expressed on the surface. Either that or it's simply not calculating it properly in autoresolve (not that we can test anything else right now)

Armor -does- make some difference in autoresolve. After fulling decking out my liege with heavy armor he was able to kill a troll. Without the armor he got his rear end handed to him in a paper bag.