Are tanks really that tough?

[Doc Democracy]

Or possibly structures and vehicles that you want to be more susceptible to shearing and tearing should have a susceptibility to being manipulated with super strength etc. then those shearing forces are actually damaging the structures from within rather than limiting the actual protection of surfaces....

[Greywind]

Disable? An enraged Hulk would not want to merely disable a tank. He would want to tear it to little pieces. As would psychotic supervillains and wartime enemies (conventional military tactics would disable a tank merely as a forerunner to setting it up for a kill shot). I am unconvinced that nudging players towards "flipping the tank over" as a means of avoiding this issue would meet with their approval.

Refer to the first Hulk movie. He dealt with tanks while enraged.

[zslane]

Refer to the first Hulk movie. He dealt with tanks while enraged.

I refer to the Ultimate Hulk. He dealt with everything while enraged, and it was horrific. I refer to the Age of Ultron (also a movie) Hulk. He dealt with Tony's Hulkbuster armor while enraged. Refer to... countless other examples of an enraged Hulk who would rend and tear instead of flip and throw and bend. I'm not sure how a kinder, gentler Hulk helps us discuss the problems of modern tank armor durability vs. superheroes with massive STR (or any attack power for that matter, I suppose).

[Christopher R Taylor]

I guess its a matter of style, a tank is destroyed if you rip the turret off and flip it over just as much as if you tear it in half.  Destroyed is destroyed, however you define it, in game terms its just a matter of coming up with the mechanics that render this possible.

 

Or we just assume that all the Example Vehicles and Example Weapons are written up for a Heroic game, rather then a superheroic one.*

 

 

I can tell you why I have resistance to that idea; it creates a two tiered system instead of a seamless blended single generic system and I don't want to see that.  It means the creatures I build for Fantasy Hero aren't the same as the ones in Champions so I can't port them across directly.  I want one game, not two.

[gewing]

I think this highlights the difficulty of a universal system that has evolved in strange ways rather than having been designed from the ground up.  Obviously the HERO principles are pretty universal but a lot of the background was not always written specifically for a universal system and some of the traditional standards came from different genres that were not based on the same standards.  Those disconnects only appear in certain places.

 

I think one place that was used was the damage dealt by weapons - often making them enough to alarm superheroes.  If those weapons could alarm superheroes then, to retain some elements of verisimilitude, tanks needed to reflect their ability to ignore some of those weapons.  That lead to defensive values that would trouble superheroes.  :-)

 

I think that the response has to be that the system has provided a lot of example values that you can use in most situations without any real problems.  If you want to have a consistent world however, you need to sit down, decide what your personal standards will be and then base everything else from there.  More consistency means more work...

 

Doc

The "scaling system" one of the Players in Dean Shomshack's  gaming group came up with solves a lot of these problems.  IIRC they pitched it to Herogames, but there was no interest.  

 

I just came into the thread, so I may be commenting in a way others have argued to death, but AIUI, the Frontal turret armor on modern Main Battle tanks as effectiveness versus Shaped Charge or Kinetic energy penetrator roughly equivalent to ONE METER of Rolled Homogeneous Armor.  The rest of the tank is less effective.  

This effectiveness comes from multiple modifiers to the basic armor.  

Part of it comes from sloping,   Not only does slope increase the effective thickness versus ground level attacks, multiple layers of protection at different angles can induce stresses in penetrators that can cause them to fragment or yaw.  Either will reduce the effective penetration. In some cases, attacks will even ricochet off without penetrating deeply.   AFAIK, the front glacis plate of the M1 Abrams uses this effect.   It is, iirc, at about a 70degree angle from attacks parallel to the ground.  Part of the design was for fighting from prepared firing positions, and those apparently often slanted the whole vehicle so that the glacis was even more sloped.  I have read claims that it is only around 70mm of high hardness steel.   A WWII gun could penetrate that, particularly if firing down at it such that the impact was perpendicular to the armor.   

 

This effect will probably NOT be very effective against many attacks from supers.   Grond's fist is more likely to come down on it like a club...   oops

 

Then there are the effects of layering and spacing armor.   Even if an attack penetrates that glacis, there is apparently a large volume of fuel underneath it.   This would act in various ways to limit the further penetration into the tank.   And I believe there is a bulkhead behind the gas, in front of the Driver, that while the ARMY may not describe it as armor...   well most of us would.  

 

Those revised figures someone posted are imo pathetic.   While the 25mm of the Bradley, loaded with APFSDS-DU has reportedly penetrated the side and lower front armor of tanks, it should NOT be relatively easy to penetrate the sides, rear, and top of ANY modern MBT with a .50 caliber machine gun.   16 Def?   On a target that is so big, multiple hits from a machine gun are almost certain in a gaming situation?      

[gewing]

They are designed to resist anti-tank weapons.  But... let's say you could attach a cable to one of the armored plates on the front of the tank.  Do you think the Abrams could be suspended in the air from that cable, supported only by whatever is holding that plate on?  It weighs 70 tons.  A 60 Str brick can lift 100 tons.  I think if he stood in front of the tank and started yanking on things he could probably tear it to pieces.

 

 

That is true, an Abrams has to have at least hardened defenses.  And this brings up an aspect that's really hard to simulate in games, how things can be really tough but be damaged anyway, in various ways.  In Hero you can do it by making some parts of a tank foci, so they are separate from its heavy armor.  And certainly while an Abrams can shrug off just about any weapon, if you dropped it 20 feet, it would be destroyed.

If the 60 str brick grabbed the bottom of the turret and lifted, he could tear it off probably pretty easily.   Penetrating the armor, however, is a bit different.  Heck He could grab the towing hooks on the front and probably flip it over.  not catastrophically destroyed, but certainly not a threat anymore. 

[gewing]

I kind of feel that there's a sweet spot in the Hero damage model where DCs and real-world forces intersect, and beyond a certain point, the disconnect between lifting capability and the corresponding damage output becomes untenable. Pre-Crisis Superman has a STR of at least 125. The astronomical lifting capacity of that STR (nearly one million tons) yields a "modest" 25 DCs of damage output. Most starting heroes can easily buy enough PD to shrug off the average BODY damage of a 25D6 attack. Yet nobody would be surprised to read a comic book and see pre-Crisis Superman use his million-ton STR (or his heat vision) to tear open, say, one of Braniac's starships.

 

The truth is that when the target is a character, the Hero System does not by default want to see realistic levels of carnage, and if that makes damaging inanimate objects harder, so be it. You'll have to hack the system a bit to deal with this, but I think that's okay. I find this far more workable than, say, the GURPS approach in which the core of the system is grounded in realism and superheroic levels of STR, damage, defense, and skill breaks everything.

GURPS became EXTREMELY lethal in a hurry...    IIRC defenses were something like 5 times as expensive as attacks?  My books are in boxes "somewhere."

Armoring a character to survive even a 7.62x51 or .30-06 hit was rather difficult, and to survive a .50 caliber...     Though blowthrough rules helped a tiny bit...

[NuSoardGraphite]

 

 

 

Those revised figures someone posted are imo pathetic. While the 25mm of the Bradley, loaded with APFSDS-DU has reportedly penetrated the side and lower front armor of tanks, it should NOT be relatively easy to penetrate the sides, rear, and top of ANY modern MBT with a .50 caliber machine gun. 16 Def? On a target that is so big, multiple hits from a machine gun are almost certain in a gaming situation?

The average damage of a .50 machine gun....10.5 body....has no chance of penetrating the tanks side armor. A damage roll of 17 or 18 can be considered to hit a weak point in the armor. A seam, a vulerable part of the track. A viewing slit or electronic equipment. In any case it will only generate 1 or 2 body damage and such rolls should be rare in the extreme.

[dmjalund]

Give the tank armor the "Real Armor" limitation

[gewing]

The average damage of a .50 machine gun....10.5 body....has no chance of penetrating the tanks side armor. A damage roll of 17 or 18 can be considered to hit a weak point in the armor. A seam, a vulerable part of the track. A viewing slit or electronic equipment. In any case it will only generate 1 or 2 body damage and such rolls should be rare in the extreme.

I guess I have seen way too many maximum damage rolls...

 

 

besides, the vehicle is HUGE,   this makes it likely a LOT of chances to roll high will exist.  

 

I suppose if you use the "Average damage" rules...

 

though that always seemed to me to nerf the weapons.  

[NuSoardGraphite]

If you want the tank to be completely immune to .50 cal weapons, raise the defense to 24 front, 20 sides. Bounces the maximum damage from a HMG and other similar weapons, but is still not immune to large calibur tank weapons. Resistant, yes, but not immune.

[Hugh Neilson]

I just came into the thread, so I may be commenting in a way others have argued to death, but AIUI, the Frontal turret armor on modern Main Battle tanks as effectiveness versus Shaped Charge or Kinetic energy penetrator roughly equivalent to ONE METER of Rolled Homogeneous Armor.  The rest of the tank is less effective.  

 

This effectiveness comes from multiple modifiers to the basic armor.  

 

Part of it comes from sloping,   Not only does slope increase the effective thickness versus ground level attacks, multiple layers of protection at different angles can induce stresses in penetrators that can cause them to fragment or yaw.  Either will reduce the effective penetration. In some cases, attacks will even ricochet off without penetrating deeply.   AFAIK, the front glacis plate of the M1 Abrams uses this effect.   It is, iirc, at about a 70degree angle from attacks parallel to the ground.  Part of the design was for fighting from prepared firing positions, and those apparently often slanted the whole vehicle so that the glacis was even more sloped.  I have read claims that it is only around 70mm of high hardness steel.   A WWII gun could penetrate that, particularly if firing down at it such that the impact was perpendicular to the armor.   

 

This effect will probably NOT be very effective against many attacks from supers.   Grond's fist is more likely to come down on it like a club...   oops

 

Then there are the effects of layering and spacing armor. Even if an attack penetrates that glacis, there is apparently a large volume of fuel underneath it. This would act in various ways to limit the further penetration into the tank. And I believe there is a bulkhead behind the gas, in front of the Driver, that while the ARMY may not describe it as armor... well most of us would.

Except that this is all much more specific than the game system is intended to handle. How do we duplicate this result using existing Hero mechanics? Perhaps some of the tank's defenses need to be limited to be effective only against those types of attacks that they are intended to handle (perhaps that is best purchased as Damage Reduction). Now, however, we have a tank which has much better defenses against military weapons than a Super does.

 

How often, in game, are characters firing autofire machine guns at a tank? How often are they either the targets of the machine gun, or the attackers of the tank? Whichever has the greatest frequency is, IMO, the one which the system should focus on.

  

Those revised figures someone posted are imo pathetic.   While the 25mm of the Bradley, loaded with APFSDS-DU has reportedly penetrated the side and lower front armor of tanks, it should NOT be relatively easy to penetrate the sides, rear, and top of ANY modern MBT with a .50 caliber machine gun.   16 Def?   On a target that is so big, multiple hits from a machine gun are almost certain in a gaming situation?

 

The average damage of a .50 machine gun....10.5 body....has no chance of penetrating the tanks side armor. A damage roll of 17 or 18 can be considered to hit a weak point in the armor. A seam, a vulerable part of the track. A viewing slit or electronic equipment. In any case it will only generate 1 or 2 body damage and such rolls should be rare in the extreme.

So do we want high realism that the gun has no hope of inflicting any damage to the tank? Is that actually realistic, or is there a chance that the machine gun CAN damage the tank? If it is possible, then a tank with 18 defenses has now become unrealistic in that fashion. Now, which is more cinematic, the hero ineffectually machine gunning the tank, or a lucky shot damaging the tank?

 

If the 60 str brick grabbed the bottom of the turret and lifted, he could tear it off probably pretty easily.   Penetrating the armor, however, is a bit different.  Heck He could grab the towing hooks on the front and probably flip it over.  not catastrophically destroyed, but certainly not a threat anymore.

 

Again, I come back to mechanics. How does the 60 STR Brick achieve this result in game? The tank has defenses of 16 (20 from the front) and 19 BOD. Grond will average 2 BOD per hit with his 90 STR, requiring 10 phases to reduce the tank to/below 0 BOD. 60 STR? Not a chance! Grond will never get past the 20 defense, 25 BOD of an Abrams tank.

 

So, if we want that powerhouse Super Brick to tear through a tank (ignore attacking it from the front - we'll further limit that to being effective only against appropriate weapons), he needs to inflict 45 BOD on a standard attack. That's STR 225, but we wanted a fairly effortless tank destroyer, so let's set his STR at about 250. He needs about 150 defenses to weather a hit for 50d6 taking "only" 25 STUN, and about 90 STUN so it takes 3-4 hits to KO him. As an added bonus, he's able to shrug off military grade attacks, which is also an issue for our typical 60 STR Brick. There's a pretty huge jump between HMG and the next step up - maybe there should not be. Maybe, instead, they get Reduced Negation to effectively penetrate that tank armor without being more devastating to our Brick.

 

Could be done, I suppose, but those stats go far beyond "cosmic" in the game design. Seems like it would be a lot easier to tone down the defenses and DC's of military grade hardware. I certainly agree that the defenses and DCs need to be coordinated. Maybe that military grade HW needs less defenses and more Damage Negation. Give that tank 6 DC's Damage Negationand 6 defenses and it is immune to that HMG. A 60 STR Brick now does BOD on any above average roll. Make it 8 DCs and 1 Defense and it is just as invulnerable to the HMG, but our 60 STR Brick tears out 3 BOD on an average roll. Grond shreds 9 BOD on a typical hit.

 

If you want the tank to be completely immune to .50 cal weapons, raise the defense to 24 front, 20 sides. Bounces the maximum damage from a HMG and other similar weapons, but is still not immune to large calibur tank weapons. Resistant, yes, but not immune.

But now Grond can't make a dent with an average hit, and our 60 STR Brick is no more than a speed bump. If that was the goal, fine, but it's not what the player expecting to play the characters he watched at the movies is expecting.

 

The thread poses the question of whether tanks are really that tough. Well, they are really resistant to damage, but we can only gauge whether the balance between weapon damage and tank defense is realistic. What STR is required to tear through a tank? There's no reality to check against there - we don't have any 60 or 90 STR Bricks to conduct our scientific research with. With that in mind, we need to assess how tough we want the characters to be, and set the weapon and tank stats accordingly.

 

This isn't just Supers if we cross genres, how do we want a Dragon and the military Tank to interact? Silly question? What if we modify our Dragon a little and make him a nuclear powered dinosaur (up from the depths...30 stories high)? Supers, giant monsters, tanks, wizards, dragons - if the game is supposed to handle all of these, then tanks and military weapons need to fit within them, so we get the interactions we are expecting.

 

Right now, anything that can compete with military grade hardware renders even Cosmic powered characters ineffectual. Sorry, but that is just wrong! And what stats do Cosmic Weapons and Battle Gear need? The charts seem to drop backwards once tech advances into science fiction!

[massey]

The truth is, in the real world, weapon "damage" (if you could abstract it into something so simple) is fairly predictable.  Whether it's a .50 cal or a 120 mm sabot, the performance of the projectile is pretty consistent.  The amount of propellant is the same, the material it is made of is the same, etc.  It will normally penetrate the same amount of material, time after time.  Shoot a gun of any sort at a barrier of uniform composition, and you'll find that it will either consistently penetrate the barrier, or it won't.

 

Now, the thing is, targets aren't normally uniform in composition.  Vehicles have thicker parts and thinner parts, they have fuel lines, they have important things that are easy to break, and big heavy parts that are hard to break.  So when you see a Youtube video of a guy shooting an engine block with a .44 magnum, remember that it is made up of different materials and have different thicknesses, and that's why some bounce off and some go straight through.

 

In Hero this is all abstracted.  Objects have a flat Def value, weapons do a random amount of damage, people have a score called "Body" that represents "life points" or something of that nature.  If a weapon rolls low on damage, it is assumed to be a grazing hit, or hit something unimportant, or hit the thickest part of the vehicle, or whatever.  In the real world, when designing military weapons and tanks and planes, this is not abstracted.  A very large amount of money is spent building weapons to either pierce or go around the really really tough parts.

 

Any time you attack in Hero, it has the chance of either rolling low or rolling high.  Sometimes this can produce head-scratching results.  This isn't limited to military weaponry.  A 2D6 pistol can blast a person-sized hole through a brick wall.  An 8D6 RKA Explosion can land on top of a man and roll 8 Body and 8 Stun, leaving him totally freaked out but not actually needing medical attention.  These situations are generally rare, but the game does not create any sort of explanation for why they happen.  It's just part of the game.

 

The problem here is that people are asking for a higher level of accuracy from their military weaponry than they get from any other type of combat in the game.  We know that a .50 cal won't penetrate the armor on a modern tank, even from the rear, so that means a modern tank "must" have at least 18 Def... right?  And we know that this cannon will penetrate this tank but not that other tank, so that must mean this, that, and the other.  And that's how we get our stats for military vehicles and weapons.  The problem, of course, is that Hero combat is abstract by its very nature, and when you do this you're applying a level of exact measurement that it was never meant to handle.  There's no reason to be more upset that a .50 cal does some Body to a tank on a good roll than when a pistol leaves man-sized holes in a brick wall.

 

When you have the Hero damage escalation that you see today with newer military weapons, you encounter another problem.  An 8D6 RKA Explosion, on a good roll, will do enough Body to destroy the Golden Gate Bridge in one shot.  That's way way waaaay beyond the level of an Abrams tank cannon.  Deciding that this part right here must be simulated perfectly is going to get you in trouble when you stray outside of that, very limited, set of circumstances.

[Christopher R Taylor]

But now Grond can't make a dent with an average hit, and our 60 STR Brick is no more than a speed bump. If that was the goal, fine, but it's not what the player expecting to play the characters he watched at the movies is expecting.

 

 

Which, again means the approach is to use one of the tweaks suggested here or one you come up with to properly simulate the genre.  In other words, reduce the defenses of inanimate objects with "real armor" as a limitation against PCs, give PCs penetrating damage against these kind of targets, etc, etc.

[Netzilla]

One could simulate the sloped armor effect by building half the defenses Only vs. Attacks on the Same Horizontal Plane -X.  So, any attack that comes in from above (such as the Ironclad leaping directly onto the tank, atomic fire breath from a 30-story lizard or even an aircraft firing from above) will have far less defenses to deal with.  Whereas other ground units will have to get through the full armor.

[NuSoardGraphite]

A 60 STR brick cant damage the old 4th edition 20/16 tank reliably. 60 strength brick is going to average 12 body...not enough to threaten the Tank.

 

A Brick tricks power with AP strength and some extra dice of Hand to hand damage will probably do the trick though.

 

I also think that the average Champions campaign (based upon what people post on this message board and my own experiences with various groups) sports defenses that are too damned high. The average superhero should NOT be able to bounce a 120mm tank round, but most Championd games I have noticed have defenses starting at resistant Def 20 and going up from there. in my opinion, that is the defense of a pretty tough Brick. Ost others should have resistent defenses at half that amount. When this is observed, the 20/16 tank armor remains impressive. Characters with resistent defenses of 10-12 are relatively bullet proof amd with N def of 10-12 will be very resistant to Stun damage. Without being immune to heavy military hardware, or requiring said heavy military hardware to be boosted into the stratosphere to have the desired effect.

 

And stop comparing the strength feats of characters like Superman and The Hulk to things that the "average" Brick should be able to accomplish. Those guys arent average. They are both near the top end of their respective universes and are not representative of the average. the Thing and Collosus are closer to that average (But still quite a bit above it due to experience gained). A STR 60 brick should not be able to tear a tank apart effortlesly. With some effort, sure (push plus haymaker) or with a special move the Brick has developed specifically to destroy campaign "furniture" (2d6 NND does body, the defense is being a living creature) but I have zero issue with a run of the mill brick not being able to tear apart an abrams.

 

The greatest thing about Hero is that if you want to simulate it, you can. That includes making a brick that can effortlessly take apart tanks if you want to, you just have to write it up properly.

[massey]

I think the average comic book brick is well above a 60 Str.  I know Marvel has their "100 ton" standard, but objects their bricks lift routinely weigh more than that.  100 tons isn't really all that heavy, as far as objects go.

[NuSoardGraphite]

Well, Collosus, Thing, Abomination, Hulk and Thor are well above average bricks. These are all signature characters. A character I woulld consider to be an average brick would be someone like Luke Cage. Very strong, very tough but not ridiculously so.

[Christopher R Taylor]

It depends on their incarnation.  Thing and Collossus from the 70's and 80's hadn't spent so much experience so had much more modest stats and power displays.

 

I have built more than a few brick strong man types using extra strength for non-combat/lifting applications.  So you can lift more than you can hit, because it seems standard for comic books. Spider-Man can lift a bus, but he doesn't take Dr Octopus' head off with a punch, no matter how mad he is.

[Greywind]

Thing was a 50-60 in his first appearance. Over time I worked up to a steady 60. Then he went all spikey and his STR went up.

Colossus was a good 75 from his first appearance until his death.

[NuSoardGraphite]

Thing was a 50-60 in his first appearance. Over time I worked up to a steady 60. Then he went all spikey and his STR went up.

 

Colossus was a good 75 from his first appearance until his death.

Both Thing and Colossus are currently rated at 100+ which is where the ratings get fuzzy. There is a rating above that but it is not particularly well defined either. And we all know how inconsistent comic book writers can be when it comes to their characters strengths are concerned. Unfortunately in the context of an RPG, we cant be that inconsistent.

[massey]

We could debate the exact values of guys' strength all day.  Sadly, the one thing all our ratings have in common is this -- none of them can scratch an Abrams as currently written.  And that's just not right.

[zslane]

I guess I have seen way too many maximum damage rolls...

Are your players using loaded/trick dice or something? If so, you might want to look into that.

[Christopher R Taylor]

In the Official Handbook they were listed as below 100 tons lifting, so not even 60 STR, for what its worth.  But yeah we could discuss all day since the depiction of the characters and their actions varies wildly based on the writer and the story told.

[zslane]

Right. And that's why in other threads I've advocated using published game stats for these characters. The only thing to then agree on is which RPG to pull from for any given character (since there have been several incarnations of both Marvel and DC superhero RPGs over the years).

 

So, if you take the Hulk and his Unearthly (100) strength, how easily can he "tear apart" a tank in FASERIP? How easily can Superman do the same thing with his 25 MEGS strength in DC Heroes?