Cost of Darkness

[Toadmaster]

I was building the main gun for a Sherman tank as a multipower

RKA (AP shot)
Energy blast explosion (HE shell)
and
Energy blast aoe, with darkness (WP incendiary smoke shell)

While the other two rounds came in at about 250 points, but the WP shell was almost 700 points due largely to the darkness (120 points for 12" radius). I hadn't realized how expensive darkness was. My question is am I reading it right, 10 points for 1", 10 points for each additional 1" radius, Change environment is 5 pts for the first inch and 5 pts for each doubling of the radius, it seems that maybe that is how darkness is supposed to read (2x radius not +1" radius) since that seems to be how almost all other AoE powers work.

[Eodin]

You are indeed reading it right. For darkness to sight ( a targeting sense), it costs 10 pts per 1" radius.

Back when there rumors that someone was going to buy HERO and publish Hero 5th, I was hoping this exception to the Area Effect rules would be modified. But Full Darkness, as opposed to a -3 Sight PER from a Change Environment, is a powerful difference. So you might want to go with a Change Environment instead. Plus, with the Change Environment, the -x to PER can be faded to nothing over time, unlike the Darkness that's either there or not.

[Toadmaster]

Thanks

Since it was WP and is not supposed to be as thick a smoke screen as HC but is instantaneous instead of taking time to build up (I'm going to do HC as darkness with a delay limitation) I went ahaed and did it as a change environment -4, heavy fog was -3 so I figured a heavy chemical smoke would be about like night (plus I'm sure it cause ones eyes to tear up etc, unlike fog)