I might interpret it differently than described, for example I'd probably come up with some ways for light and negligible damage to cause more than cosmetic inconveniences, especially if the shots hit the joints of an armour suit.
And I think that's great. If one of my players thought like you do and, when using an NSP on a Mindy, go "I know my weapon's not great against this thing, so I'll try to focus on the softer points of articulation", I know that as a GM I'd want to humor you.
I noticed the LASR is given as an example of a heavy anti-personnel weapon, though it looks like it was ADR 3 in the previous version. I'm a bit confused about that.
The LASR has a weird history of wiki stats not living up to the way it ended up being used in the actual roleplay. It was never considered that effective against power armored targets in contrast to its competitor to go on a Daisy's shoulder-rack: the plasma rifle. Especially considering many opponents had strong exotic armor types like yamataium, nerimium and zesuaium. Faced with a choice between firing ineffectual shots over zesuaium armor, or using the often dependable plasma rifle... the latter was the most popular pick.
The LASR made its identity by having a significantly high rate of fire that let it be useful against softer targets; like a horde of Mishhuvurthyar than the slower firing plasma rifle dealt with less handily than fewer, harder targets. It still does damage on power armor, but like explained in the SADRv2 conversion section, visually the LASR is pictured as a weapon that will tear down another power armor by shredding them with its high rate of fire, rather than the individual punch of any single projectile.
I'd also suggest merging the 'vs. lightly protected personnel' and 'vs. heavily protected personnel' tables into just 'vs. personnel' since their content is mostly redundant.
I don't disagree. This was something that was on my mind too. I was on the edge of folding it in with its sturdier neighbor, but refrained because the majority of our roleplayers spend most of their time in uniforms, and some of those - like the Star Army Type 30 - were said to be protective enough to be treated as light personnel tier.
I honestly don't agree on the placement of the Aggressor and Ripper - I feel that the Aggressor should be Tier 7 and the Ripper Tier 6 considering the disparity in size and weight between the two.
Hey! o/
I thought the Aggressor was a power armor, not a larger mecha. Rereading its "entry & interior" info, I have to admit you're correct: it's clearly bigger than the Hostile.
I was convinced the Ripper was bigger than an ED-209 when I used it in the Miharu plot... and I just found out it was only 7.5'. Wow. Yeah, it's an Heavy Armor. Boo. I always imagined those from the art as huge monsters for boss encounters.
There's also the Offensive Augmentation Pods too - I don't know why they're way up there, but considering how I've usually seen them in RP, maybe Tier 4 or even 3 alongside the SLAG grenades? They are 'mini-missiles' after all, and I imagine the payload that the two carry would be very similar.
There was a post I made a little bit back that had me explained how I rated weapons and why. I basically said:
"Offensive Mini-missiles -
Heavy Anti-Armor: Probably our Power Armors' closest way of emulating the Macross Missile Massacre, we have less missiles, but they are decidedly quite deadly to power armor and a threat even to larger units."
Reflecting from experience coming from Wes' plot that I followed up in my own, the mini-missiles by themselves were at least as potent as the main handheld weapons. That was an instance of "the weapon lives up to more than just its wiki stats". Not to mention that since power armors have easy access to drones that can shoot the mini-missiles down, it seems like there had to be some payoff for the mini-missile that did connect to a target (or a compelling reason why you'd want to shoot them down ASAP).
There's also that the same mini-missiles seem to be the only kind of non-torpedo guided warhead around, which means fightercraft use them and expect them to be of some good in dogfights against other fightercraft. That's a holdover of back when fighters were forced to be in the same Armor Grade as power armors. So, they kind of have to toe the line between the two... and heavy anti-armor does seem to make a decent compromise.
IMO, I don't think you're wrong, but it's been a bit all over the place. I feel like there's should actually be
micro-missiles which do exactly what you say and would be more wiki-accurate, and
mini-missiles that do about what I say which would be more accurate to the roleplayed intents I've seen. Along with
actual missiles for fightercraft to down other fightercraft with.
1. Something that I'm scratching my head over is how ships have 6 tiers to differentiate them, while the rest only have 3. That feels like oversimplification when I think there's more in-betweens with some items. This is especially odd since most RP on the site revolves around those three, and PA in particular, yet are the sections with the least depth.
Well, previously, we had 5 ships categories. I always kind of felt like we were reaching a ceiling too early for things like SDR5. So many stuff ending up SDR5 when some of them still felt more potent than others. Now we have stretched that out by one and it seems more comfortable to me. I could have made a more clear line between starships and capital vessels like I did the rest, but I chose not to do so and visually made two separate categories look like they were a bigger one - mostly for smoother transition from the previous system to this one.
As for the others, SADRv2 essentially had SP5/10/15 for power armor and that never seemed like it was a problem, so a sample size of 3 seemed adequate. Mecha were previously squeezed into two spots, SP20/25, and worse, they were stuck in the armor grade. Now, they have their own category, one more spot to actually show that they can be of bigger size (up to half a tennis court; then a full tennis court; or about the size of an Orbiter Shuttle seems pretty adequate to me and a clear improvement of what there was before).
Earlier in this thread, there was pressure to increase the sample size to 5 items per category. I tried to work with Eistheid and humor that, but it never worked right in my eyes. Later on after I had put this on ice, Wes expressed that he had been fond of my original 3 'sample size per category' version, so, this is what I've returned to.
At any rate, I do consider that it successfully fulfills one of the main objectives for bringing this forward, which is giving better representation and scale to mecha and more strongly distinguish them from power armor. Though it sounds like you'd wish a bigger sample size, it doesn't sound like you disagree.
2. The next thing that stands out for me would be how barrier/energy-shield tiers appear to be force matched with armor tiers. Though it's not common, I would like it to be possible to mix things up by having under-armored units with heavy shields or heavy armor units with low shields. That sort of thing. It'd potentially give more flavor to new tech and such this way.
Do you really want to open that can of worms? SADRv2 did about the same thing with little variation; "SP 10, Shield 10/1", "SP 20, Shield 20/2", etc. Like I mentioned in the cliffnotes, it's to avoid arms races. People trying to have their thing be the special snowflake, and one-up the things other people have made.
I see no problem with willfully aiming lower. You can certainly tweak the material, or choose to have a ship actually not be armored ("We're a science vessel, we come in peace!" *boom* -
U.S.S. Grissom, ST3). You can pick the kind of barrier layout you want; some are clearly more advanced than others. Nothing stops you from deciding your ship is rated to a weaker barrier either - I just don't expect it'll happen often.
3. It appears that energy shields are more effective than armor? That could discourage the use of armor heavy but low shield units - I'm not sure why the same hit that'd pierce armor would only deplete a shield by 50%.
That's based on an earlier recommendation on my part that barriers be worth roughly 2 'potentially lethal' attacks.
I kind of get the feeling you're overrating barriers. Don't forget that the lethality is per shot, and that not every hit landed on, say, a power armor will strike a fatal spot or ablate at the same spot.
Say a Daisy power armor is shot at by an LASR: it's hit six times on the chest, each shot spaced out to make a dotted line across the chestplate. So, the Daisy has six pockmarks spread out across its chestplate... big deal? Maybe the wearer will need to catch his breath, but after that he'll ride out that kind of damage just fine.
But if the barrier had been active, all six shots would have had reduced it by 72%
Attacks can be spread across the body of the entire power armor. A lot of the areas struck may not be that significant or pivotal to a fight, but everywhere the Daisy would take damage, the barrier would deplete equally. That's why I made it the way it is.
Yes, it's true that the barrier itself can soak up more damage than the strongest point on a Daisy could. But barriers previously saved Daisy armors from being cut in half by an aether sword at the cost of being entirely drained before, so, this seems consistent to me. I once had 'potentially lethal' do 100% instead of 50%, but that really didn't seem like enough, especially considering the high rate-of-fire weapons out there that are still going to tear through that like wet tissue paper, especially in climatic encounters against larger opponents.
4. This has been a sometimes frustrating point in the past, but is it possible for something of a lower tier to upgun itself, such as a person grabbing an Anti-Armor Bazooka, or a 25mm Precision Rifle? There's mention regarding ships, but not cross category armament.
Yup, I covered that in the wiki article. It's right above the Tier table:
"You will also notice that there are divisions by categories:
Personnel,
Power Armor,
Mecha, and
Starships. These are for ease of reference and scale, but are not exclusive.
For example: an infantryman can carry an Anti-Mecha bazooka to take down tanks, and fightercrafts can load up anti-starship torpedoes in the hopes of taking down bigger prey. It's also fairly common for larger starships to carry a complement of weapons to deal with smaller targets such as fightercraft."
* * *
Changelog:
On Cadetnewb's suggestion I switched places between the Ripper and the Aggressor.
- I'm annoyed that the shield and armor information is so far away from the Tier table. I think things are in the right order for explaining the concept, but it's not an optimal order to quickly reference it. So, I'm thinking I could have a miniature 'quick reference' version of the article for the benefit of people that do grasp it but want to quickly check something on it.
Navigation flow could be like:
Main SADRv3 article > SADRv3 quick ref
Wiki article (unit, weapon) > SADRv3 quick ref >Main SADRv3 article