Adding a rung to the ladder

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A Javelin is a man carried Anti-Tank missile. an AT-4 Carl Gustav is a man carried Anti-Tank rocket.


I'm going to offer a compromise. Why don't we have weapon size rules for stuff? Like, a PA can have an ADR 5 weapon, but it has to be heavy, bulky, and either a single shot weapon. Like a Bazooka, or a man carried Anti-Tank rocket. And maybe a maximum of ADR 3 for PA standard PA weapons?


And why not have an option of giving weapons qualities? Instead of having all aether weapons do ADR 5, why not have them do normal damage for their size, and give them the Armor piercing quality, which does an extra 1/2*DR of damage? OR stuff like that?

Just to throw something in:

One of the problems I've noticed is the large contradiction between the damage and SP in the armor/mecha tier. With the current set-up It would take 5 hits with an ADR5 weapon to destroy any Size 5 armor. However, it seems odd to me that if I'm driving down the road in my heavy tank that the enemy can drop a tactical nuke on my tank and I'm still ok, much less having them drop 2, 3, or 4 nukes on me and I can still keep driving down the road.

Same statement stands for the ship tier. Currently if I have a size 1 ship it can sustain 10 hits from SDR1, 5 hits from SDR2, 4 hits from SDR3, 3 hits from SDR4, and 2 from SDR5. My problem with this is that if I have a battleship with a god-mode super weapon it should NOT take 2-3 hits to destroy a puney transport or escort. At weapons that powerful I envision a beam with a radius almost the size of the escort.

Just some thoughts.

Armors already have qualities depending on the ones you select for your unit/vehicle.

Weapons have the same. They don't have to be labeled, with those traits absolutely carved in stone and such. It's the GMs perogative to go and apply them.

You have to remember that the whole DR system is there for comparative purposes to give the user - the roleplayer - an idea of what his gear can do. That's also why each submission has fluff RP descriptions.

It was never meant to be the basis of e-peen shaking contests.

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Gabriel, you raise an interesting point.

I recall in the past that a Sakura gunship was once one-shotted by a Mishhu gunship's heavy positron cannon. In theory, the Sakura-class should've survived... but the hit took it at a bad place.

The Structural Points aren't hit points and they are an abstract value. Your ship/tank could in the best of cases function until all of them are depleted (ideally), but usually you'll get some level of internal damage that may compromise you sooner than that.

I once hinted that if a weapon did more than 10% of the remaining structural points the said vehicle had left, you're probably looking at armor penetration and internal damage. The bigger the number by contrast of the ship's SP, the worse the vehicle will take it.

Again, the numbers aren't going to solve everything. Sometimes, they won't make that much sense and a GM will just apply the rule of common sense himself. Being a referee is part of a GM's job.

That makes more sense. So SP is more of a "percentage of functionality" than an actual guide line of hull integrity. However, that means that in theory that nuke could land on that tank and the tank driver could happen to get lucky and still be able to drive away; keep in mind this is all AFTER you dropped the first nuke to destroy the shield. I envision a nuke landing next to a tank and completely obliterating it, throwing it several yards, and leaving it in shredded pieces.

And on that shields note. Lets say you have a heavy tank using standard tech on the shields. That means that your tank has a shield of roughly 15 points. That means that THREE tactical NUKES just to get through the shield, and a FOURTH just to start causing internal damage; not to mention the fact that your tank could potentially have advanced tech, at which point I would need another two tactical nukes on top of the other four. And now lets say I decided to drop tactical nukes on a ship yard of Yamataian patrol crafts (keep in mind this is hypothetical), if I wanted to even get through the shields of the ships I would need to drop TEN tactical nukes with the ships in the blast radius of ALL of them just to get through the shields, plus more to do structural damage.

Something about this all seems off.

As far as I am concerned, ADR 5 can level a building. I'm not so sure about the tactical nuke part: I'm not the one that made up the comparisons and frankly that's not how I'd GM it.

I mean, people say that most anti-starship weapons could fire down on a planet and obliterate a continent. but, when fired on a starship (something arguably smaller), the ship - even shieldless - seems to be able to take the hit. In light of that, is the weapon truly capable of destroying a planet when it doesn't destroy a ship?

If you want to point your finger at inconsistencies, they are there. No amount of rule lawyering is going to remove them, whatever the damage scale taken unless you go for a very draconian one.

You could, of course. I'm just not sure many plotships will stick to it. As a GM, I sure wouldn't - I prefer my ship being able to take hits, use that as a factor for increased tension and something to promote roleplay.

Gabriel said:

And on that shields note. Lets say you have a heavy tank using standard tech on the shields. That means that your tank has a shield of roughly 15 points. That means that THREE tactical NUKES just to get through the shield, and a FOURTH just to start causing internal damage; not to mention the fact that your tank could potentially have advanced tech, at which point I would need another two tactical nukes on top of the other four.

Click to expand...

This is pretty much how the site works, Gabriel. Size class 5 mecha units are huge monstrosities that stand at the height of a high-class suburban duplex and have shields that can weather anything something smaller than it can throw. It's the difference between a unarmored rifleman and an MBT. The scale is just that much larger.

We can handwave it with science fiction materials science, though. Without advanced composites, alloys, metamaterials and non-periodic crystalline aggregates, nothing in this site would be possible. Ships would rip apart just crossing into FTL, and PA being dropped from orbit would burn up in re-rentry.

Alright, Fred I see your point, essentially it just depends on the GM.

And Ex, that makes a little more sense, because I was still visioning a modern-sized tank with sci-fi capabilities. That helps quite a bit with the comprehension. Although, it is still off, but I guess it can't be perfect.

Thanks for clarifying guys.