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Closed Rework how armor affects STL speeds in DRv3

These suggestions have been dropped by the suggestor or rejected by staff.

Alex Hart

FM of NDC
🎖️ Game Master
I was working on a new starship and thinking about speeds when it struck me that there's something that we could probably improve on. In DRv3 currently, starships are assigned an STL boost that gets progressively higher as their armor gets lighter (So a normally .375c cruiser with medium armor might get a .025c boost to .40c).

I think this is kind of counterintuitive and makes armor not matter that much since you're not actually facing any speed penalty for using the heaviest armor available to you, and I'd like to propose that we rework this system so that armor reduces your speed rather than giving you a boost.

Essentially, this would work as an inverse of the current scale, with light armor giving -0.00C and heavy armor giving -.075c.

Alternatively, a hybrid between the current approach and the more intuitive "Armor makes you slower" approach might be more appealing to people, where no armor would give a boost of +0.05, light armor gives a boost of +0.025, medium armor gives a penalty of -0.025 (or 0.00) and heavy armor gives a penalty of -0.05 (or -0.025).

I kind of expect this to get shouted down, but I figure I might as well suggest it since the worst people can say is no.
 
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This suggestion has been closed. Votes are no longer accepted.
I didn't vote up or down but I'm not really feeling this suggestion. I don't want you to feel ignored, though, and I am listening. I guess my issue is I've never really liked the way speeds are handled at all because realistically we should be thinking in terms of acceleration--and indeed, armor generally equates to mass which affects acceleration but not speed. But that makes things really math-heavy if we were to go that route. I guess speeds are not usually super relevant to the RP for most players so that may be why this thread doesn't seem to be attracting a lot of interest.
 
I didn't vote up or down but I'm not really feeling this suggestion. I don't want you to feel ignored, though, and I am listening. I guess my issue is I've never really liked the way speeds are handled at all because realistically we should be thinking in terms of acceleration--and indeed, armor generally equates to mass which affects acceleration but not speed. But that makes things really math-heavy if we were to go that route. I guess speeds are not usually super relevant to the RP for most players so that may be why this thread doesn't seem to be attracting a lot of interest.

That's my struggle as well. I feel like the speeds don't make sense in various ways - we've got 300+ meter long ships that are as fast as some of the setting's fastest fighters, very little reason not to just max out the speed on every single ship, etc, etc. And yeah, acceleration vs velocity plays a big part there.

But then I think about how it plays out in RP and I start to think that we could just say 'Slow' or 'Very Fast' in the field setting and end up at the same result. With the exception of the few times we step out to actually do some math on Discord, I don't know how often the speeds play into plots or combat.

So I have this dilemma while I'm reading the suggestion - if I wanted to make updates to the system, I'd want to do some significant overhaul, possibly including Speed and Acceleration or something along those lines, ideally converted into simple English on most pages in a fashion akin to how DRv3 works. I'm happy to work with Alex or others if there's an appetite for it, but I also know it's not strictly necessary.
 
I wish we talked about acceleration as well, but no one can ever seem to agree about that here (Some people say everything on the site using certain propulsion methods accelerates instantaneously, I like to RP acceleration differences between different things, etc.) so I confined the scope of this to speed and how I thought that could be improved since SARP has always thought about things in that more anime/star-wars-y way.

Re: Whisper's point about not always maxing out speed, I wanted to make it so that there's a reason not to do that, since the only way to do it would be to have no armor at all, and it wouldn't give you some huge boost to speed either, you just wouldn't take a penalty.
 
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Just realized/remembered this while looking at the article - since the speed chart maxes out at 0.375c already, another way to look at it is that everyone is already taking the maximum armor penalty. If you set your speed to 0.375c, that's the fastest a heavily armored ship is allowed to go.

I think your original suggestion mentioned all that, but I may have gotten lost in the shuffle somewhere. Just bringing it back in.
 
Just realized/remembered this while looking at the article - since the speed chart maxes out at 0.375c already, another way to look at it is that everyone is already taking the maximum armor penalty.
Not nessecarily, a lot of things (Azusa, Chiaki B, Spectre, Cobra Gunship, a lot of fighters and power armors) go higher than .375 (Sometimes in spite of their armor, looking at you Mindy, going .38 with heavy armor) but I digress.

The speed chart's top speed is achievable by getting a *boost* to your speed by taking no armor, which just doesn't make any sense, regardless of whether we want to get into the granularities of talking about starship acceleration and going "Oh yeah they have the same top speed but a fighter accelerates faster".

The point of this was just to propose a change to "Armor makes you go slower" from "Not having armor makes you go faster"
 
I would prefer a slower acceleration than lower speeds. Even with extra mass, you would need a more powerful engine system to accelerate a given vessel up to higher speeds. Which means higher energy expenditures. Simply saying 'heavy armor' is also an inadequate representation of the problem. The thicker the armor the heavier it becomes as well. Let us take Zesuaium for example (And hear me out) we have a vessel with .5 meters of Zesuaium plating, Zesuaium neither bends nor does it break. This means its innate mass and density are exceedingly high or have reached the point of infinite rigidity. It has even been documented canonically (It can be found if you dig somewhat deeper into the narrative) that it is a very heavy substance to the point that if it is used in a Daisy or Daisy II's shield it requires a sealed vacuum within to assist in this or require something akin to a NH-27, or Eihei to successfully lift and utilize. Even then I imagine the substance is not as thick as one would believe in regard to a Ketsurui Samurai's weapon but still lend enough weight to make it an effective tool. If we were to also apply the same reasoning to Nerimium, or Yamataium for example, Nerimum trumps Yamataium in overall mass due to its super dense nature.

While I can agree to a point, thickness of hull and material used within it, and such things as a framework should be taken into account as well. However, given the nature of propulsion technology reaching such incredibly high thrust to mass, this could possibly be counteracted to a degree thanks in part to the power sources these engines and propellants used. We're not talking about sitting on hundreds of tons of liquid oxygen propellant. But a form of exotic matter-based plasma in Turbo Aether. Particle Drives, CDD, and so on. I would also submit that the combined field systems could attribute to an overall reduction in the weight of a given vessel to help alleviate this problem. To what degree I neither know nor really care. Acceleration could and may likely be a more amenable consideration when propelling a ship with thick, heavy, and super-heavy armor materials. A Mindy does not have the sheer thickness of plate as a Plumeria, Azusa, Himiko or Sharie, or a Dreadnought. At best a Mindy with Zesuaium armor doesn't need thick plating due to its own combined field systems and the overall protective value Zesu provides as well as its natural manuverability as an effective combined defense. A micrometer of the substance from a purely narrative standpoint could tank multiple anti-personnel fires, up to anti-armor unless something truly nasty is used like Plasma, AM, or Aether itself. While it provides a protective value, the transferal of kinetic impact and the resulting energy may still be harmful to the pilot regardless.

While I may have gone off a self-important tangent and possibly failed in the explanation I'll try and put it in a more succinct fashion. Do I believe heavy armor should be penalized, yes? But in terms of acceleration, not top speed. This is splitting hairs on my part I know, I'm not wholly disagreeing with this idea. But trying to get my point across that mass should require more energy to accelerate and other consistencies of a given faction's technology are taken into account. The 'creep' will eventually arise regardless of whatever new system or proposal is put forth. Perhaps not for weeks, months or even a few years. But it can and will happen eventually. So any solutions we may come up with now may not work for tomorrow and the future's sake as people try to bypass this with 'more advanced' systems to wiggle around it despite rule enforcement or changes in how overall technology works in relation.
 
My initial thought was about acceleration when I saw this post so it's cool to see everyone generally on the same page regarding the science (or at least how it works in SARP). Maybe armor type could dictate acceleration in a few categories rather than impacting top speed. For example: no armor is "very fast acceleration," light armor is "fast," medium armor is "average," and heavy armor is "slow acceleration." Something that keeps things simple while providing the GMs and players using these ships to have a rough narrative guide on what ships are agile and zippy versus what ships drive like a Volvo.
 
My initial thought was about acceleration when I saw this post so it's cool to see everyone generally on the same page regarding the science (or at least how it works in SARP). Maybe armor type could dictate acceleration in a few categories rather than impacting top speed. For example: no armor is "very fast acceleration," light armor is "fast," medium armor is "average," and heavy armor is "slow acceleration." Something that keeps things simple while providing the GMs and players using these ships to have a rough narrative guide on what ships are agile and zippy versus what ships drive like a Volvo.
I'm pretty cool with this approach and it would be easy to bolt on to the existing speed framework.

Gonna make a separate thread for something similar: https://stararmy.com/roleplay-forum/threads/narrative-based-approach-to-speed.67457/
 
I’d love to see Raz’s idea re:acceleration introduced into DRv3’s speed section.

Is the general consensus that we don’t want to flip the top speed and armor relationship to get rid of the “STL boost” provided by lower armor?
 
I think I prefer the current bonus instead of a penalty. Either way we're asking people to opt into something and I feel like opting into 'faster' is better than opting into 'slower'.
 
It looks like this suggestion isn't really getting traction so I'm closing it. Thanks everyone for your feedback. Even when suggestions fail we learn stuff.
 
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