How Limiting are your Limitations?

[archermoo]

Originally posted by Gary

You've just crippled the entire military throughout the 20th century. Until very recently with smart weapons, the whole concept of bombers, and artillery and rocket barrages was to place lots of high explosive near the enemy and hope that some of the bombs or shells land close enough to do some damage. At Stalingrad, the Germans use to try and blow up entire buildings just to get a few snipers in it or nearby.

 

Yes, but at least to my mind they were still targeting a specific hex of the building, rather than the building as a whole. That and real world physics doesn't have to deal with people trying to get around it's rules.

[Blue Angel]

Originally posted by Gary

The trouble with using megascale is that the misses are on a megascale level as well.

 

Megascale range and megascale area are bought seperately. Just buy megascale area but not megascale range.

[tesuji]

if you claim "aiming at the planet" to get the huge DCV penalty, then you hit somewhere on the planet. A hit location chart perhaps broken down by continent would be appropriate to determine where the shot landed. If you then wanted to use a "called shot rule" to try and hit a specific HEX on the planet so that your shots will hit there, you should expect a to hit penalty to represent the difficulty in hitting the single hex. Call me silly but after the DCV penalty and the called shot penalty, i bet most GMs would agree the net result ends up being DCV3 to hit a hex.

 

Amazing thing that.

[archermoo]

Originally posted by tesuji

if you claim "aiming at the planet" to get the huge DCV penalty, then you hit somewhere on the planet. A hit location chart perhaps broken down by continent would be appropriate to determine where the shot landed. If you then wanted to use a "called shot rule" to try and hit a specific HEX on the planet so that your shots will hit there, you should expect a to hit penalty to represent the difficulty in hitting the single hex. Call me silly but after the DCV penalty and the called shot penalty, i bet most GMs would agree the net result ends up being DCV3 to hit a hex.

 

Amazing thing that.

 

The point is that he put the area effect up such that it won't matter where on the planet it hits, as long as it hits somewhere. So he's just trying to tack on the extra minuses for targeting something the size of a planet to get more of the 640 autofire shots to hit. Basically an attempt to get around the rules.

[JamesG]

How embarrassing

 

My Apr 22nd post in this thread had a major rule interpretation error. Serves me right for posting before double-checking the rules.

 

OK, I now agree that if you hit a target with ‘x’ number of area-effect autofire hits, that all other targets with the area-effect will also be hit ‘x’ times (barring a dive for cover out of the area of course). But I still don’t think the power will do anywhere near 640 points of stun, and here is why. Let’s look at the last version.

 

Originally posted by Gary

1/2D6 EB AVLD(+1.5 def is power defense), Penetrating X2 (+1), Autofire (+1.5) Area Effect radius (+1) O end (+1) X2 million radius (roughly the planet earth with a little to spare) (+7.75) Does knockback (+.25) 640 shots (+3.5) 55 active points

 

This way, as long as an attack lands somewhere on the Planet Earth, the target will get hit.

 

OK, I accept that you can target the planet earth using this power and that all hits to the planet will hit everyone else on the planet due to the area of effect. But by rule, any misses will scatter in such a way that the planet is not damaged, and by extension, nobody on earth will be hurt by the misses.

 

So the question is, how many hits can you generate? The Bestiary lists the Giant Space Amoeba as being larger than Earth and having a –48 DCV penalty. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say Earth is –48 DCV as well. So assuming an OCV of 10 targeting a –48 DCV (0 DCV adjacent hex, -48 for the whole planet) that’s an average of about 29 hits.

 

Since the base of the power is ½ D6, only about half of those will do penetrating stun, so that’s 15 Stun on average. The 29 inches of KB is nasty though. In fact, the whole power would be more dangerous with less shots, but a higher base, since you’ll never be able to land anything approaching 640 shots.