Back to the main page

Mailing List Logs for ShadowRN

Message no. 1
From: shadowrn@*********.com (James Zealey)
Subject: Vehicles (was Great Dragon)
Date: Wed Aug 7 20:25:01 2002
---- Begin Original Message ----
From: "Grim Shear" <grim_shear@*******.com>

It's supposed to be a small tank, and it's main drawback is that it only has
a Body of 2. Take a burst from a standard assault rifle to it: 11S becomes
5M, then nothing happens, because it's vehicle armor. Okay, this is harsh
for guys toting assault rifles. As an extreme example, you could shoot it
with a PAC, and if you didn't get to stage up damage, it would bounce off.

The second it goes up against anything heavier, it starts failing. HMG's,
even MMG's are quite capable of doing rather nasty things to one. And all of
this is _without_ AV ammo.

Any sort of damage that gets past a vehicles armor tends to begin doing very
bad things to it, mainly because most vehicles have bad Body values.

---- End Original Message ----

Just a couple of things - staging has no effect on whether you penetrate armour or not. It
doesn't matter if you're doing a deadly with a bazillion extra successes, if you're not
using AV ammo, and you don't have a power of 26+, you aren't damaging the drone.

IIRC MMGs and HMGs don't reach an unmodified power of 25, so they don't do anything to a
steel lynx.

As soon as you add AV ammo to the mix, it gets taken down by anything bigger than a light
pistol, due to AV ammo halving vehicle armour and not being halved itself.

In short - vehicle rules are seriously stupid. They may as well have just been given a
barrier rating, and treated like any other object (ie, it's dead as soon as you beat the
barrier rating). At least that would have allowed scenes where someone with a big enough
gun can gradually hammer a vehicle to bits (if your power is above 1/2 the barrier rating,
you reduce the barrier rating by 1).


"Your gun has 'replica'
written down the side, mine
has 'Ares HVAR'..."

____________________________________________________________
Get your own FREE Web and POP E-mail Service in 14 languages at http://www.zzn.com.
Message no. 2
From: shadowrn@*********.com (Lone Eagle)
Subject: Vehicles (was Great Dragon)
Date: Thu Aug 8 05:05:02 2002
>From: "James Zealey" <incubus@*********.zzn.com>
>Just a couple of things - staging has no effect on whether you penetrate
>armour or not. It doesn't matter if you're doing a deadly with a bazillion
>extra successes, if you're not using AV ammo, and you don't have a power of
>26+, you aren't damaging the drone.

I'd have to check but I think you've missed something, what about the weapon
which does 26L? (I know that there is no such weapon (or at least I think I
do)) all damage is automatically staged down by one by vehicles, however if
you stage up to M it stages down to L and actually takes light damage. (Like
I say I'll have to check the order in which you take things into account...)

Also I may be misreading but I didn't think AV rounds halved the vehicles
armour, I thought they brought things back to parity, the Ares Predator does
9M rather than 4L...
They act as APDS against non Vehicle targets so...

_________________________________________________________________
Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail.
http://www.hotmail.com
Message no. 3
From: shadowrn@*********.com (James Zealey)
Subject: Vehicles (was Great Dragon)
Date: Thu Aug 8 19:55:01 2002
---- Begin Original Message ----
From: "Lone Eagle" <loneeagle2061@*******.com>

I'd have to check but I think you've missed something, what about the weapon
which does 26L? (I know that there is no such weapon (or at least I think I
do)) all damage is automatically staged down by one by vehicles, however if
you stage up to M it stages down to L and actually takes light damage. (Like
I say I'll have to check the order in which you take things into account...)

Also I may be misreading but I didn't think AV rounds halved the vehicles
armour, I thought they brought things back to parity, the Ares Predator does
9M rather than 4L...
They act as APDS against non Vehicle targets so...
---- End Original Message ----

First up I made a mistake - I'm remembering the rigger 2 steel lynx which had 12 armour,
not 9. For now, lets work from 12 armour since that's where we started. The lower armour
would just emphasize my point more.

The way it works is that if your weapon initially does an L, then the weapon is incapable
of damaging the vehicle, unless it has AV ammo. This is specifically noted.

The original comment was that staging has no effect on armour penetration - this is
correct. In the case of the 26M weapon versus 12 armour, the 26 is getting through the
armour. If it was a 25M weapon, then staging would have no effect - 25M is halved to 12,
which is then reduced to zero. Under standard SR3 rules, staging cannot increase power.
Furthermore even if staging COULD increase power, the rules specify that the comparison is
done with the base, unmodified damage code of the round.

As soon as you arm up with an SMG (base damage 7M) with AV rounds (halves the vehicles
armour, doesn't suffer any reduction of it's own), you're getting through that drone's
armour. A single shot will do (after armour calculations) 1M. If the rigger isn't in
control of the drone, that's going to get staged, and the drone only gets to roll 2 body
dice. Minimum of a light wound. As soon as the guy with the SMG burst fires or gets
successes, the damage rapidly increases, and there's absolutely nothing the drone can do
about it. We go from a vehicle which is immune to direct hits from 30mm cannons to one
which is automatically damaged by a low calibre weapon. If the vehicle is larger than a
drone, or has much less armour, the scenario is even worse, because the shooters' TNs go
down as the vehicles' size goes up, and this tends to outpace the increase in body which
accompanies size.

And Derek - the point of this thread is pointing out problems with the rules as written. I
think most of us understand that there is a problem, but unless we can think of a
consistant set of rules (and declaring one or two additional weapons to be AV isn't
consistant) the problem is going to continue.

I for one favour a system in which the body dice of a vehicle are comparable with that of
a human being, and armour ceases to be an all-or-nothing affair, as I believe Damion does.


"Your gun has 'replica'
written down the side, mine
has 'Ares HVAR'..."

____________________________________________________________
Get your own FREE Web and POP E-mail Service in 14 languages at http://www.zzn.com.

Further Reading

If you enjoyed reading about Vehicles (was Great Dragon), you may also be interested in:

Disclaimer

These messages were posted a long time ago on a mailing list far, far away. The copyright to their contents probably lies with the original authors of the individual messages, but since they were published in an electronic forum that anyone could subscribe to, and the logs were available to subscribers and most likely non-subscribers as well, it's felt that re-publishing them here is a kind of public service.

Thwap!