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One person versus a starship?


lendrick

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

Give some serious thought as to what sort of damage you want your future weapons doing. The longsword dates to about 1350 and does 1D6+1 Killing damage. The Browning pistol dates to around 1908 and does 1D6+1 Killing damage. That's 550+ years of technological development resulting in exactly zero more damage.

 

There are clearly advantages to the pistol, of course! It does damage at range. It's small and light. It doesn't require as much metal to be made. And so on and so forth.

 

There are clearly advantages to the sword, too. No ammo required. You can add STR to damage. Yadda yadda.

 

What I'm getting at: The weapons in your Star Hero campaign should be different from today's weapons, but that doesn't mean they have to do a lot of damage. They might have advantages (and Advantages) today's weapons lack.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

I imagine more advanced weapons gain the Armor Piercing Advantage when used against obsolete armor ...

 

How much PD do you think Medieval Plate Mail provides against a bullet?

 

I'll give you a hint: It is somewhere less than 1. Maybe 1 at most.

 

I'd put an "Obsolete" Limitation on any such armor (which would half its defense against non-obsolete weaponry) rather than AP on the gun, then any AP gun would be that much more effective on the obsolete armor, without needing to "buy AP twice" like in the old days.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

How much PD do you think Medieval Plate Mail provides against a bullet?

 

I'll give you a hint: It is somewhere less than 1. Maybe 1 at most.

 

Actually the best quality plate provides pretty decent protection against bullets - certainly enough to stop musket fire, and at range, enough to deflect modern small arms fire. It's also hot, heavy and requires a lot of maintenance. Modern armour is a far better match for a modern soldier's needs, of course.

 

cheers, Mark

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

I'd like to chime in on the Damage Negation option. Damage Negation plus either high-DC attacks or Reduced Negation can really create the kind of scale differences you are interested in. If you figure out a set of scales/sizes/classes for vehicles, you can assign each class a standard amount of DN and extra DCs or Reduced Negation (I suggest the extra DCs unless you seriously want vehicle weapons only doing human-scale damage to people and smaller vehicles). Then when comparable-sized vehicles hit each other, you'll still only be rolling on the order of 2d6K or whatever, whereas when a human-scale weapon hits a large vehicle you'll probably be rolling 0d6. If you go with extra DCs, the only time you're going to be rolling massive amounts of damage dice is when a large vehicle hits a human or smaller vehicle, and that seems both appropriate enough and rare enough that it shouldn't be a problem.

 

For example, you could use ranks of vehicle size class with associated Damage Negation+Extra DCs that looks like: automobile (3DC/1d6K), tank/shuttle (6DC/2d6K), fighter (9DC/3d6K), starship (12DC/4d6K), super-freighter (15DC/5d6K), battle station (18DC/6d6K). Then when a 2d6K human-sized laser hits an automobile, it'll do 1d6K damage; when it hits a fighter, it'll do 0 damage. When a fighter's 5d6K weapon (equivalent of a 2d6K human-scale weapon, plus the 3d6K from the fighter's vehicle class) hits another fighter, it'll do 2d6K damage; when a fighter hits a human, it'll do 5d6K damage (ouch!).

 

If you don't want to buy bunches of HUGE attack powers for each vehicle, you could probably do something like the Deadly Blow and Weaponmaster Talents where you just give a vehicle 2N CSLs limited to damage only, where N is the number of extra DCs it gets for its size class. Thus each vehicle package could simply look like:

 

Class X Vehicle

3X extra DCs:
CSLs: 6X 10-point levels; Only to Increase Damage (-1/2) [60X active; 40X real]

3X negated DCs:
Damage Negation: -3X DCs physical, -3X DCs energy [30X active, 30X real]

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

Edit: Per 6E1p48' date=' a "competent" human maxes out at 20 BODY. 35 points of killing damage would put them at -15 body, which means that, *on average*, the "planet-destroying" cannon wouldn't kill Rasputin (or an Elephant) let alone a whole planet. Now, I know Rasputin's pretty tough, seriously. :)[/quote']

 

Actually he'd go from "perfectly healthy" to " Down and dying in a few seconds" which counts as instakill in my book. A slightly above average roll would vapourise him. That said, it's still pretty wimpy for a "planet-destroying" weapon. I think that's just an example of poor design.

 

My suggestion (and this applies across the board to vehicles and bases, not just to starships) is to work your design process like this:

 

1. Work out what you want personal weapons to look like. I agree that futuristic sidearms don't need to do huge amounts of damage - a DC or to more and other advantages (greater ammo capacity, PSLs vs range, etc) are enough to ensure they outclass real life weapons.

2. Design your personal defences so that your personal weapons have the desired level of effect.

3. Design your squad level weapons so that they interact with personal armour appropriately

4. Design your vehicles so that they interact with squad level weapons and personal weapons the way you want.

4a. Ignore standard Hero system vehicle design rules, which I have never liked, and use this simple rule of thumb :)

Instead of calculating a vehicle's total BOD and DEF they way they do in the rules do it by section.

So (to take your example, using the rules as a guideline, a Serenity class starship is smaller than a 747 (25 BOD) and larger than a Learjet (18 BOD). It's closer to the former, so lets call it .... ummm 22 BOD. Now, divide up your vehicle into sections, the idea being that each section represents an integral part. Like this:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]37256[/ATTACH]

Now, each section has that amount of BOD.Each Section beyond the first costs +5

This does several things.

1. Your vehicle as a whole now has sufficient BOD that it can take more damage than a tough human: but it's not impossible to damage easily - a well placed shot can cause great harm.

2. You can easily calculate the effects of damage. Doing damage to the Cockpit is going to have a different effect than blowing a hole in the Hold.

3. You avoid ludicrous outcomes like destroying a battleship by doing it a small amount of damage. Very large vehicles can have many autonomous sections. This lets you damage them, without necessarily destroying them. Military vehicles will capitalize on this by having sealable bulkheads, redundant systems, etc, letting you make them tougher without having to have ludicrous amounts of DEF. Of course, you can destroy a vehicle without needing to destroy every section - for example, blowing up the passage and life support sections on the Serenity will make the Cockpit drop off even though it has taken no damage.

 

You don't needs to sketch out every vehicle of course - just decide what sort of modules it has. So you might class a Tie Fighter as Cockpit/Engines. An Abrams has Crew compartment/Turret/Engine. A small system defence ship has Bridge/secondary Bridge/Quarters/Storage/Fighting compartment/Engineering1/Engineering2. It's not a lot bigger than a Serenity-class (BOD 25) but the fact that it's more compartmentalized and better armoured (DEF 15, Hardened) means that it's a helluvalot tougher.

 

That should solve your problems.

 

cheers, Mark

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

Actually the best quality plate provides pretty decent protection against bullets - certainly enough to stop musket fire, and at range, enough to deflect modern small arms fire. It's also hot, heavy and requires a lot of maintenance. Modern armour is a far better match for a modern soldier's needs, of course.

 

cheers, Mark

 

Stopping fire from black powder muskets does NOT equate to reasonable defense against modern firearms.

Rule of thumb from WWII period: it requires 0.25" (6.35 mm) of steel to defend against a rifle with standard military (FMJ) ammo.

WWII rifles are generally 2d6+1 RKA in HERO. Medieval plate armor thickness maxes out at around 1.6 mm, and the material was not as strong as early 20th century steel.

Pulp era (1920's to WWII) "bullet proof" vests used much better steel plates, which tended to be around 3 to 3.5 mm thick. These vests would provide reasonable protection from pistols, but not from rifles. In fact, when the "357 Magnum" first came out, it was touted as able to penetrate "bullet proof" vests.

Now HERO rules do not reflect reality well here: 45 auto rounds tend to do more damage to a human than 9 mm parabellum rounds do, but the latter have better penetration. Still, the pulp "bullet proof" vest is around rPD=6. So against 20th century firearms old plate armor would be at most rPD=2, probably rPD=1 for most.

Of course, the non-resistant PD would be higher; as would its protection against unpowered weapons such as knives, arrows, etc.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

Actually the best quality plate provides pretty decent protection against bullets - certainly enough to stop musket fire, and at range, enough to deflect modern small arms fire. It's also hot, heavy and requires a lot of maintenance. Modern armour is a far better match for a modern soldier's needs, of course.

 

cheers, Mark

 

Hence the term "pistol proof", although I heard sneaky armorers would reduce the powder load in their pistols when showing off how tough their armor was.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

The plate armor vs modern gun tangent has me wondering the other way. How effective is modern armor at stopping, say, a war hammer or flail or broadsword or crossbow? That's a real question. I don't know the answer and I'm curious.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

The plate armor vs modern gun tangent has me wondering the other way. How effective is modern armor at stopping' date=' say, a war hammer or flail or broadsword or crossbow? That's a real question. I don't know the answer and I'm curious.[/quote']

Well, a knife can stab right through most kevlar vests, for one thing. No idea about broad impact.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

Kevlar isn't too hard to cut with a sharp edge, but the ceramic plates inside modern armor would stop a knife cold. You could probably fracture it with a heavy sword, but the kevlar would pad the ceramic somewhat. It would be an interesting experiment to try out. I would expect that even with an axe, it would take some pretty heavy punishment before failing. The main drawback being that the plates don't cover the whole area that the kevlar covers.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

And anything a knife can stab through' date=' a crossbow will blow right through.[/quote']

Maybe, though my understanding is that the acute point and sharp edge of a knife serves to help shear apart the kevlar's molecular structure (whereas the impact of a bullet causes strain in the direction of molecular chains), and I'm not sure whether a crossbow bolt would behave more like a knife or a bullet in this case. It might depend a bit on the characteristics of the head used maybe. Beats me.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

Maybe' date=' though my understanding is that the acute point and sharp edge of a knife serves to help shear apart the kevlar's molecular structure (whereas the impact of a bullet causes strain in the direction of molecular chains), and I'm not sure whether a crossbow bolt would behave more like a knife or a bullet in this case. It might depend a bit on the characteristics of the head used maybe. Beats me.[/quote']

 

Point. A target head isn't all that acute of a point. Hunting heads and combat point (basically long spikes... a bodkin point IIRC) would act more like a knife.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

Kevlar isn't too hard to cut with a sharp edge' date=' but the ceramic plates inside modern armor would stop a knife cold. You could probably fracture it with a heavy sword, but the kevlar would pad the ceramic somewhat. It would be an interesting experiment to try out. I would expect that even with an axe, it would take some pretty heavy punishment before failing. The main drawback being that the plates don't cover the whole area that the kevlar covers.[/quote']

 

I believe battle axes, broadswords, halberds, etc. were expected to go up against armor. The attacker was trained to go for the least-well armored spots. I expect that with modern body armor you'd see a lot of slashed arms and legs as well as attacks to the armpit. A sword didn't do much good (aside from impact, which was sometimes plenty) against plate armor if you attacked the most solid spots.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

For plate' date=' you'd use a mace, pick, or war hammer. Or any number of pole arms that concentrate impact on a small point (like a bec de corbin.)[/quote']

 

"Legsweep, then stab to the groin"....

 

Yeah, thats why as armor starting getting so good, the sort of weapons started to change...the main reason that Knights kept using swords is their main function was slaughtering people too poor to afford good armor....

 

And pole weapons got popular because they gave reach (to avoid that fearsome sword) and lots of leverage to get through...

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

"Legsweep, then stab to the groin"....

 

Yeah, thats why as armor starting getting so good, the sort of weapons started to change...the main reason that Knights kept using swords is their main function was slaughtering people too poor to afford good armor....

 

And pole weapons got popular because they gave reach (to avoid that fearsome sword) and lots of leverage to get through...

 

I think you'll find knights used a lot of different HTH weapons in period, including maces, flails, war hammers, picks, swords, and so on. The standard sword was popular because it did a lot of things fairly well (cut, slash, stab, and so on) while many other weapons only did one thing very well. Swords also have a rough cruciform shape, which is a big plus for those of a religious bent. And there was a certain mystic to them. Also, one could wear a sword at the belt far easier than anything else, so it was easy to keep one with you at all times.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

I've toyed around with treating hand-held weapons as having Reduced Penetration versus vehicles (wrt doing BODY to the vehicle, not making a hole in the side), and vehicle-mounted weapons as having Penetrating when hitting significantly smaller targets. Unfortunately, there is some overlap between the categories, so I've never implemented it.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

Stopping fire from black powder muskets does NOT equate to reasonable defense against modern firearms.

Rule of thumb from WWII period: it requires 0.25" (6.35 mm) of steel to defend against a rifle with standard military (FMJ) ammo.

WWII rifles are generally 2d6+1 RKA in HERO. Medieval plate armor thickness maxes out at around 1.6 mm, and the material was not as strong as early 20th century steel.

 

Both of these points are untrue. While medieval steel was in general, not as good quality as modern steel - and certainly not as consistent - the best smiths were able to generate steel of hardness similar to modern steel. You're also wrong about thickness: the classic works on the subject of medival armour penetration (at least in English) are Hardy and Williams. Hardy measured multiple breastplates from the 14th and 15th century and found that the average was 2.3-3.2 mm, median for center front 2.8 mm. Williams measured different armours including a number of earlier suits and found they ranged from 1.5-2.5 mm, with a 2.1 mm median. so the median for armours was actually almost twice the thickness you suggest was the maximum (that's for Breastplates: Cuisees and guardbraces were typically thinner, Armets and simlar helmets significantly thicker).

 

If you are inteesed in the topic, I can recommend Robett Hardy's Longbow: A Social and Military History and Alan Williams The Knight and the Blast Furnace: A History of the Metallurgy of Armour in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period.

 

Edit - oh and as an aside, a musket generates about 3000 J of energy at muzzle - more than most modern small arms. The advantage of a modern assault rifle is not greater penetrating power (it doesn't, in fact, have that) but finer machining and consistently performing ammo, meaning much better accuracy, much, much lighter weight, faster firing and reloading times and ammo that you can carry around without sweating too much about it getting damp. Indeed, these advantages (apart from the ammo) are why the assault rifle replaced the much more powerful and longer ranged bolt action rifles in the first place. It's about utility, not KE.

 

Pulp era (1920's to WWII) "bullet proof" vests used much better steel plates' date=' which tended to be around 3 to 3.5 mm thick. These vests would provide reasonable protection from pistols, but not from rifles. In fact, when the "357 Magnum" first came out, it was touted as able to penetrate "bullet proof" vests.[/quote']

 

Which means in fact that pulp era bullet proof vests were in fact the same thickness as the better quality medieval armour ...

 

Now HERO rules do not reflect reality well here: 45 auto rounds tend to do more damage to a human than 9 mm parabellum rounds do' date=' but the latter have better penetration. Still, the pulp "bullet proof" vest is around rPD=6. So against 20th century firearms old plate armor would be at most rPD=2, probably rPD=1 for most.[/quote']

 

How do you figure that? The thickness overlaps and the quality of the old pulp era bulletproof vests - often using metal that was poorly tempered, if it was tempered at all - was not a great deal better than the medieval/renaissance equivalent. Of the suits measured by Williams about 10% were of medium carbon content, heat tempered with less than 0.4% slag. These had VPH (Vickers Pyramidal Hardness) of 366-374, giving resistance to penetration about 50% greater than modern mild steel. Of course, it fair to mention that about 40% of the armour of the lower class troops he measured was simply iron, with VPN of 130-175 and perhaps half the ability to resist penetration of modern mild steel.

 

Still we can do better than that: Williams and Krenz did a series of calculations on the energy used to make dents in proofed armour. These vary widely (as does the armour: I notice that in one case the breastplate here is 7.7 mm thick! More than 4 times your supposed maximum, though to be fair, it's renaissance rather than medieval). Still, we can see that the stopping power of some of these armours was well in excess of 700 joules - not enough to stop a Casull, but probably enough to stop the bullet from a .357 magnum at close range. Though not all medieval armour was of that quality ... some of it without doubt was.

 

I'm not trying to suggest that medieval style armour is an effective substitute for modern body armour - clearly it isn't! For a start, modern rifles would blow clean through the best medieval armour even at decent ranges (the good ol' Lee Enfeld - my first rifle - generates 3000+ joules at muzzle: more than enough to defeat any of these armours). But you are underestimating the effectiveness of these, many of which are demonstrably good enough to stop modern handguns and some carbines. That suggests that modern weapons should get AP for free versus older armour of this type: that'd model reality closely enough for a working solution.

 

cheers, Mark

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

The plate armor vs modern gun tangent has me wondering the other way. How effective is modern armor at stopping' date=' say, a war hammer or flail or broadsword or crossbow? That's a real question. I don't know the answer and I'm curious.[/quote']

 

Or another tangent. How much rED does Modern Armor REALLY have. I have a hard time believing that Kevlar gives much ED protection. Though I could see that Ceramic inserts could add quite a bit in the way of Energy Protection. I mention this because in many SciFi universes, energy weapons have overtaken kinetic weapons (ie guns, and other slug throwers) in their ubiquity. So perhaps personal armor isn't as good vs those kind of weapons due to the materials it is made of.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

I've downscaled the damage that a lot of weapons do, since otherwise it seems like it's just a big numbers race. Futuristic weapons are cool, but I don't want people vaporizing each other in one hit, at least not while they're wearing armor.

 

One other scale issue I've seen is on page 398 of the bestiary. The "Engine of Destruction" has a planet-destroying cannon that does 10d6K. On average, that's 35 points of BODY, which a particularly tough human could endure the brunt of, to say nothing of a whole planet. The orbital cannon on 6E1p352 is another example of this. It's why I was wondering if there was something I was missing... Both of these things have MegaScale, but it appears to only apply to range. Perhaps it ought to apply to damage and BODY as well. That would keep the numbers a lot lower and still let you say that a single shot from a ship-mounted plasma beam would vaporize you instantly.

 

Edit: Per 6E1p48, a "competent" human maxes out at 20 BODY. 35 points of killing damage would put them at -15 body, which means that, *on average*, the "planet-destroying" cannon wouldn't kill Rasputin (or an Elephant) let alone a whole planet. Now, I know Rasputin's pretty tough, seriously. :)

 

The Engine of Destruction's weapons are probably a bit light in the D6s of killing. Seeing as the Nuke from 5e Star Hero is statted at 20d6RKA megascale AOE. The Engine of Destruction probably has those weapons and then a "Planet Killer Beam" that is a Plot Device that Destroys a planet if the EoD gets within a certain distance of a tasty planet. I would use those (BTW both are AP RKA's) to soften up any opposition ships while maneuvering the EoD to the correct distance. Also, it may be more like a huge energy devouring worm. It homes in on planets that have a molten core, and burrows to get at that tasty squishy molten goodness.

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Re: One person versus a starship?

 

Thanks to the "Instagib Move-Thru" thread' date=' I've come to realize that a well-executed martial throw is the best way for a solo character to take out a starship.[/quote']

 

Damn right! esp if that character is named Galactus or is an Eternal. :D

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