| From: | Marc Renouf renouf@********.com |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Vehicle Scaling System |
| Date: | Tue, 9 May 2000 12:58:31 -0400 (EDT) |
afraid I don't see much of a need to scale things in the first place. I
mean, you have personal scale, vehicular scale, and naval scale. Those
three seem to cover most of what you're going to run into, and they do it
in a way that's more or less realistic.
Note I said more or less. The problem that people seem to come up
against is that once you get to weapons of the scale that they *can*
damage heavier vehicles and/or ships, they tend to obliterate them
entirely. Sort of an "all or nothing" approach.
But this is true to life. A HEAT round makes a relatively small
hole in a tank, but totally trashes the inside, usually causing fuel and
ammo to cook off in addition to the basic round of the damage itself. An
Exocet missile is going to cause most ships it hits to sink in very short
order. Only military vessels with massive redundancy and active damage
control procedures are going to be able to stand up to a single hit. And
more than one? Unless you're in something huge that can afford to soak
the hits, seal off watertight compartments, and still float, you're
pretty much screwed. That's why point-defense and anti-missile capability
are so important in todays navies.
It's also why vehicles like tanks don't operate unsupported.
They're too easy to kill with the right equipment, and the right equipment
is man-portable.
Yes, a heavy pistol is going to play hell on a Dodge Scoot. It'll
even put holes in an Americar. Not big holes, but if you put enough of
them in it, you might just damage something. An assault rifle is going to
do bad things to an Americar (even though the base damage is lower, the
number of rounds will add to both the final power level and the damage
code.
But once you get to the level where bullets don't really have an
impact on vehicle, basically you're just chipping paint. You need a
bigger weapon, and most weapons that are big enough are going to have the
destructive capacity to destroy the vehicle if they can get past its
armor. That's sort of the nature of modern (and post-modern) warfare.
If you really want to make vehicles tougher against small arms
(which is what it sounds like you were getting at), you can simply say
that any weapon which has its damage code reduced also ignores the
shooter's successes for staging the damage up (as with shooting at
Barriers, where it doesn't matter how well you plance the shot). This
reflects the fact that single bullet holes really are trivial to most
vehicles. If you want to do more damage, go for a called shot, which is
specifically targetting a critical or less armored part of the vehicle.
Marc
