Good evening. I was looking at the bars of the turtle tactics in the battle tactics window, and I noticed the battle formation is short range for two fleets and one medium range for one fleet (reading from top to bottom) and it gives hull plating absorption as the effect of formation. Is that the correct way of reading the card? do the fleets try to get the closest as possible to the enemies to decrease a lot the damage from the enemies projectiles since this kind of weapon is only effective at mid and long range?

That's correct, yeah. The flotilla's target distance is untied to the passive effect of the card; Turtle will still block damage from kinetic slugs, for example, even though short range is their optimal range.

I don't know if I'm right but the drawback with turtle is that if you are fighting an enemy that has full hull plating defense instead of full energy defense, the player can install a lot of laser weapons that (if I'm not mistaken) have a better balance among the ranges than kinetic however, because of the turtle's close range, the ideal choice would be kinetic weapons. Speaking of which, are kinetic weapons considered energy ones?

You can always check your opponents fleet and choose your battle formation accordingly. Remember to check attackers and defenders seperately, since they funtion differently. If you build a fairly ballanced fleet you can use different battle cards to great effect. 

Another strategy is to go all in on one weapon type (e.g. energy weapons) and always use the corresponding battle card ("get lucky"). By the way: kinetic weapons are not considered energy weapons. 

On top of that the distance in battle is dependent on your battle card choice as well as your opponents, which can create some fun mindgames. 

There is a slightly outdated guide by koxsos (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=940579911), which explaines the battle cards on top of anything else you might want to know about space battles. This reddit post (https://www.reddit.com/r/EndlessSpace/comments/87qba1/on_the_influence_of_tactics_on_crossflotilla/ ) is focussed on battle tactics and cross flottilla fighting. 

I see. Thank you Apple and dragon!