MoonMan said:
DR aside, a melee weapon with the ability to, if I'm understanding these descriptions, pass through several inches of thick armor as easily as it passes through thin air sounds much more powerful than a Lorath plasma saber...and several other weapons currently in circulation. Even if it is melee-only.
It's also larger scale than most PA weapons, Moonie. This is to SARP melee weapons as anti-ship missiles carried by fighter-bombers are to the AIR2's mini-missiles.
The issue is still one of scale. The same way that it's silly for a tiny handgun to be as strong as a starship's main cannon, it is also silly for a three-meter blade projecting a distortion field to have the same power as a PA's vibrosaw knife.
I just want to know if this method of protection is going to be viable and how the blade would react if it were to come into contact with something that negated its space-warping properties.
What would probably happen is you would end up with two distortion fields impacting, with the weapon losing its distortive properties during impact and the shields having to expend more power in order to re-tune the distortion fields. In other words, the attack is blocked and shields are decreased in respects to the strength of the weapon's distortion field. If the shield's distortion field is weaker than that of the attacking weapon, then it is temporarily penetrated and the unit is struck (if applicable).
Or you subtract the weapon's DR from a shield's SP. If the shield threshold is lower than the weapon's rating, then some of the damage is transferred to the unit. However, this will only occur if the unit underneath was actually hit, since a blade might actually graze shields without impacting the armor.
There is intimidating fluff, and then there are descriptions of properties and effects and seem to outweigh the proposed DR rating given to the weapon. If this stuff can pass through armor that the DR equivalent (a tactical nuke or a Mindy 1H aether cannon) cannot, then I can see a potential for abuse.
I based the wording of certain segments such as 'bisect lightly armored powered armor' and 'remove the limbs of a powered frame' on the DR versus the armor SP of most designs in the SARP. A baseline Mindy (which I would consider a premier example of a lightly-armored unit) only has 6 SP, and the strongest mecha in the setting have an SP of 25. I thought it made sense, in that context.
A GM could just as easily interpret the weapon as basically warping the armor and weakening it by that whopping 5 MDR, making it susceptible to additional damage.