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Are tanks really that tough?


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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.

 

Gaaak... incoherent rage.

 

To avoid brain stem exploding, I'll just say the Ultimate Handbook is wrong. :)  There's tons and tons of discussion on the net about that, and on this board, so no need to go through it all again.

 

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?

 

I don't know about FASERIP.  I know that in MEGS, 25 Str will blast a tank into nothingness.  I think they have a Body score of like 10 or so.  Even someone like Starfire, with an Energy Blast of 9 APs or so, can do a Devastating Attack and probably pop a tank with one shot.

 

That is probably the best way to approach known, established characters from source material, but how many GMs would allow characters to build a Hulk or a Superman in their campaign, let alone give out the 1000+ points?

 

Most GMs wouldn't.  But again, if your version of a tank can withstand Superman and the Hulk, you need to tone down your tank.

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A 25 MEGS strength Superman is "only" a STR 125 character in Champions. If Superman can turn a tank into tiny metal shards in DC Heroes, then either tanks are woefully underperforming, in terms of their armor, in that game, or tanks are supremely over-powered in Champions.

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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!

 

A fact that has been noted before, and is a good reason for believing that the game statistics for 20th & 21st century military have been inflated specifically so they can threaten comic book superbeings.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary asks what do you find at that point in the timeline you don't find much of elsewhen? Superheroic play. And what do you find everywhen, all up and down the timeline? Heroic play.

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

No, they were not.    

 

we called them billy busters and billy flops, for the nerfed rolls.    

 

Just for example, In a LONG ago game we called "Fantasy Champions"   my character, a super fast(insane dex, high speed), quite strong, low defense(regen and danger sense)  martial artist versus our team "brick" in an "Ultimate warrior competition"   

 

My character needed to win to have a chance to marry the princess he had been in love with since he was 8 years old.  

 

The only chance I had was to hit him HARD because he had so many skill levels he could still hit me (Much more efficient build)  My character had no idea that the princess's sisters(scary mystic martial artists) had told Baby Elmo to make it look good but throw the fight.  

 

I acted first, aimed for iirc a high shot with a kick.   I hit the head, and rolled very near max damage, if I did not hit with a 3.  

 

 

When Baby Elmo regained consciousness, After having his dented helmet pulled off,  the sisters said "We told you to make it look good!"

 

Baby Elmo replied with a bit of a whine "I never saw him move!"

 

Honest rolls can create insane situations.   

 

 

Corey was always much better with quips and such than I ever was or will be.    

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Dice can be streaky, sometimes you can go on quite a run.  I recall quite well the GM asking a player "is Ricochet wearing his armor?" as he was out on a date.  The sniper rolled 18 on a 3d6 killing attack to the gut, in a dark champions game.  He survived, barely because of immediate medical attention.  It was a splash page moment.

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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.

This is dead on.

 

Thiss is why one should build their hardware to the average, so that the most common and predictable results achieve the desired effect, then the GM simply interprets the more extreme rolls in a way that makes sense.

 

Thus you have the tank with 20/16. The .50 machine gun normally does nothing, but occasionally, that roll of 17 or 18 will do body damage, at which point the GM detemines that a round hit and damaged an unarmored section of the turret, causing it to turn slower than normal.

 

That same .50 machine gun which can blow limbs off a human without any trouble hits a soldier for minimum damage which doesnt penetrate the soldiers armor. He later takes his helmet off to find that the round penetrated his helmet, got caught in the lining, followed the contours of his helmet and exited the back without leaving a scratch in his skin.

 

Maximum and minimum rolls just need a bit of descriptive license to make sense in the context of the scene and that is pretty much one of the most basic jobs of the GM if I am not mistaken.

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Well, I certainly didn't expect this much debate when I started this thread but I did find a resolution that works for me.  I just compressed DCs and Defenses for high end hardware (more than 3d6 base damage and Def. 10).  I suppose one could also use the Standard Effect Rule for real world weapons.  That is how handcuffs are built on the sidebar of 6E1 pg. 219.  That would keep damage results consistent and predictable.

 

Also, correct me if I'm wrong; someone mentioned a 2d6 handgun blowing a human sized hole in a wall.  Isn't that impossible since handguns--and arrows for that matter-- are built with the Beam Limitation?  Am I missing something somewhere?  Just asking?

 

Anyway, thank you all for your contributions.  I really appreciate it.

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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.

To me, under 6e mechanics, this suggests much greater use of Damage Negation, and much less (perhaps no) use of defenses for inanimate objects. Once we get past that armor:

 

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.

So if that Tank is expected to be damaged (not demolished) by a 60 STR character, but be undamaged by that 3d6 RKA machine gun, it might have 9 DC Damage Reduction, 2 Defenses and significant BOD. The machine gun bounces right off. Our 60 STR Super puts a dent in it, and will gradually tear it apart, but it won't be quick (of course, against such a slow target, Rapid Attack type maneuvers are possible, and a Haymaker will get a lot more damage through). Grond is passing 7 BOD through on an average, non-Haymaker hit.

 

 

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.

To simulate WHICH genre? Giant movie monsters? War of the Worlds Sci Fi? Four Colour Supers? In all of these, the published attacks of the genre characters are ineffectual against the military hardware. In what genre(s) are the stats provided necessary to achieve genre-appropriate results? A Modern Hero spy, with his 9 mm Browning, .380 A Walther PPK/S or .30 Luger P-08, is not going to be effective against a tank with much lower defenses and attacks. Nor is he likely to score an instant kill on a competent normal human - but that's the cinematic fact.

 

Is it unrealistic? Edmonton is dealing today with the death of a police officer, killed by gunfire. It has been 25 years since the last death of an Edmonton city police officer in the line of duty. How often does a single bullet result in instant death?

 

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.

So why should he not use that same attack against other opponents? If we have to trick it out to damage the tank, it seems like something is wrong with the tank, IMO.

 

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.

I'd say Supers rDef has evolved to reflect the average attacker with a KA. If a tough attacker may have 15 DC's, averaging 17.5 BOD on a hit, my 10 BOD, 10 rDEF Super is in big trouble. Players don't want to lose characters, and rDEF reflects the expected power level of a typical opponent, not of military hardware, in a typical Supers game.

 

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.

Grond is, to me, the Hero Hulk. Hulk can effortlessly rip apart a tank. Grond should be able to do the same.

 

The question of Superman and the Hulk in Hero is similar to Conan or Legolas in a fantasy game. These are the characters players read about, see on the movie screen, etc. They are the source material the game is intended to emulate. To suggest that it is unreasonable for players to expect to play characters who can do the things they see in the source material is, in my view, disingenuous at best. The game should be able to handle - easily - Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye and Captain America so that a half dozen players walking out of the Avengers movie can see it in their gameplay.

 

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.

In the source material, bricks routinely take apart tanks effortlessly. That this is not possible when one takes a typical Brick writeup, and a tank writeup, from the official rules indicates that the official characters are not written up properly.

 

 

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.

 

Exactly.

 

That is probably the best way to approach known, established characters from source material, but how many GMs would allow characters to build a Hulk or a Superman in their campaign, let alone give out the 1000+ points?

So, you are saying that Hero, the cinematic game, for which Supers is the most popular and oldest genre, should not be expected to be able to duplicate the superheroic characters the players watch in the cinema? Sorry, but I cannot agree. The characters in my Supers game should be Super - that is the whole premise. The game system should support that. The fact it does not - that the three sample Supers at the back of 6e Vol 2 would be crushed by a tank - indicates to me that the write-ups fail to deliver on the promise.

 

According to the writeup in the book, Maelstrom "can project devastating blasts, surround his fist with energy to create a devastating punch, or use energy to shield himself or fly." That "devastating punch" is 8d6, and his most "devastating blast" is 12d6 (most are 8d6). Interacting with the Hero System real world, he gets crushed by standard military hardware. So how did he manage to become as overconfident as he is described?

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That would make it not terribly official :)  Or at least, the viewpoint of the editors of that book varies from that of guys who write the comics.

 

 

Comic books are the primary source.  The OHOTMU is a secondary source.  When the OHOTMU disagrees with the comics, the comics take precedence.  I believe there are some quotes out there from the guys who wrote the handbook, who said that the editors told them to keep the strength calculations under 100 tons to make it more "realistic".  I'm pretty sure I've seen an image somewhere of the first publication of the handbook that had higher strength scores in there as well.

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According to the writeup in the book, Maelstrom "can project devastating blasts, surround his fist with energy to create a devastating punch, or use energy to shield himself or fly." That "devastating punch" is 8d6, and his most "devastating blast" is 12d6 (most are 8d6). Interacting with the Hero System real world, he gets crushed by standard military hardware. So how did he manage to become as overconfident as he is described? 

 

 

You're comparing Maelstrom to Superman, not to normal people.  Its a question of what your scale is.

 

 

 

An 8D6 RKA Explosion, on a good roll, will do enough Body to destroy the Golden Gate Bridge in one shot. 

 

Not the way I would build the bridge.  But in any case, plenty of suggestions have been made in this thread on how to make the system work well with inanimate objects.

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My first step in balancing them would be to apply the Standard Effect rule to all "real world" weapons when they shoot at objects, with a bit of discretion.  A guy who shoots a D6+1 handgun at a car should get to roll his damage to see if he hit something vulnerable.  But as far as shooting a .50 cal at an object for purposes of seeing what armor it can penetrate, we can assume that it does about 9-10 Body.  Once the weapon's Standard Effect damage passes a certain threshold, then you get to actually roll damage.

 

For instance, a .50 cal shoots an armored wall.  Def 10.  The damage from the rifle cannot penetrate the thick steel.  No damage.

A .50 cal shoots a "bulletproof" limo.  Def 8.  The average damage will do 2 Body.  The round is able to penetrate the armor.  Roll normal damage.  You might fluke out, you might crap out.  The .50 cal rolls 14 Body and puts 6 on the vehicle.

 

Once I'd done that, I'd refigure the damage of weapons and the Def of vehicles as I went up.  Something like a LAW might be 4D6, a TOW missile maybe 5D6, I'd gradually increase the numbers.  But I'd expect the front armor of a tank to be no more than maybe 16 or so.  I might also decrease the Body that a tank would have -- it's mostly armor plate, important drivey stuff, and things that blow up.  Once you get past the armor plate, anything you can hit inside is bad.

 

If they were still too tough for heroes?  I might give them a Vulnerability to super attacks.  After all, their armor is built to resist traditional military weapons, not gravity blasts, lightning attacks, or super-strength yanking.  Generally I think a 12D6 hero should be able to defeat a tank without a whole lot of trouble, even if they have to get a little bit creative to do it.

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For instance, a .50 cal shoots an armored wall.  Def 10.  The damage from the rifle cannot penetrate the thick steel.  No damage.

A .50 cal shoots a "bulletproof" limo.  Def 8.  The average damage will do 2 Body.  The round is able to penetrate the armor.  Roll normal damage.  You might fluke out, you might crap out.  The .50 cal rolls 14 Body and puts 6 on the vehicle.

 

I like this as a general rule, something useful for GMs to use with inanimate objects and breaking things.

 

Extrapolating, it might be useful to come up with a method of breaking things automatically; in other words, go the other direction, that after a certain threshold you don't have to roll at all.  Like if your average attack's body count will break it, don't bother rolling.  That saves time, embarrassment, and frustration.

 

For example, the hero Sergeant Steel was a bodyguard for a young PC.  The young PC got taken hostage, and I tried to fly up through an elevator shaft, crashing through the roof.  With the move through I did like 12 dice, but rolled almost all 1's.  The roof dented slightly and I bounced off.  In a comic this never happens unless its deliberately trying for humor.

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I like this as a general rule, something useful for GMs to use with inanimate objects and breaking things.

 

Extrapolating, it might be useful to come up with a method of breaking things automatically; in other words, go the other direction, that after a certain threshold you don't have to roll at all.  Like if your average attack's body count will break it, don't bother rolling.  That saves time, embarrassment, and frustration.

 

For example, he hero Sergeant Steel was a bodyguard for a young PC.  The young PC got taken hostage, and I tried to fly up through an elevator shaft, crashing through the roof.  With the move through I did like 12 dice, but rolled almost all 1's.  The roof dented slightly and I bounced off.  In a comic this never happens unless its deliberately trying for humor.

word, I deal with this as "heroic actions" no dice rolled unless you have unlucky. Unlucky means embarrassing failure is an option.
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I like this as a general rule, something useful for GMs to use with inanimate objects and breaking things.

 

Extrapolating, it might be useful to come up with a method of breaking things automatically; in other words, go the other direction, that after a certain threshold you don't have to roll at all.  Like if your average attack's body count will break it, don't bother rolling.  That saves time, embarrassment, and frustration.

 

For example, the hero Sergeant Steel was a bodyguard for a young PC.  The young PC got taken hostage, and I tried to fly up through an elevator shaft, crashing through the roof.  With the move through I did like 12 dice, but rolled almost all 1's.  The roof dented slightly and I bounced off.  In a comic this never happens unless its deliberately trying for humor.

 

Yeah, and sometimes that's cool, what you want, right? And sometimes, it's incongruous to the experience that everybody's having. This is why old school gaming & I don't really get along that well - I don't like disparagement humor in most circumstances, and I certainly don't enjoy being the subject of it. 

 

And that's ok! Different senses of humor are a thing; my academic mentors kind of pioneered the study of such, so believe me when I say no judgement.

 

Anyway, one thing we started doing was allowing people to just count all damage dice as 3's, rather than roll the whole thing out. The total is less than a standard effect, but in cases where anything but a bad roll should succeed, more than enough to do the trick. I like it in general, like the option to buy successes in Shadowrun 4/5: give the option to take a sub-average total in exchange for surety. Speeds things up, adds a tactical layer that feels solid to me (Play it safe? Or swing big?) and doesn't feel incongruous in a system where casual strength is a thing.

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Dice can be streaky, sometimes you can go on quite a run.

Dice can appear streaky, but that is because humans have an intrinsic need to find patterns in everything and to assign deterministic causes to everything, even random events.

 

A series of single die rolls has a fairly high variance because each individual die roll is independent from the others. However, most rolls in the Hero System involve adding several dice together, which pulls results towards a bell-shaped mean. This is a nice way of keeping outcomes closer to a comforting average and away from the discomforting extremes. So unless a campaign is making heavy use of KAs under 2D6, dice totals should gather noticibly towards the average (and for those who hate a linear STUN multiplier die roll, I recommend rolling 2D3-1 instead of 1D6-1).

 

Unless, of course, the dice are loaded, flawed, or not being rolled honestly by players.

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Yep, law of large numbers. Roll enough, and it'll even out. Multiple dice help bring things toward expected central tendency. It's frankly one of my favorite things about HERO, and you're right to point it out.

 

However! Human beings operate under primacy and recency effects, and so whether or not something averages out, those outliers can feel huge, depending on where they happen. And since I am engaging in an experience, not a mathematically sound research model, the feel is significantly more important to me. If my character makes 100 3d6 rolls, my mean value is going to be extraordinarily close to 3.5. 

 

But those rolls don't exist in a vacuum. And by the time that we're a couple rolls in, if we start with some outliers - which is not particularly unusual - then those establish primacy. Also, one "bad" roll can overwhelm the feelings associated with the past several average, or even good, rolls. 

 

This is further conflated by the fact that most dice are not Vegas weighted, and are in fact, going to skew a little. No need to throw around accusations of cheating players - if people buy dice meant for RPGs, those dice will skew. It's a simple truth of the manufacturing process. And can be fun, leading to people's various dice superstitions, which I at least find interesting.

 

But yes. Primacy. Recency. They are real things that exist. To ignore their effect makes as much sense as ignoring normal distributions - and I'm not even saying don't! I think that d20 games are much less frustrating for people who don't understand how randomness works, or have made peace with linear randomness as the way physics work in Faerun, or whatever. 

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And to bring things back on-topic; the way that RPGs simulate randomness tends to make for a highly unpredictable world. Even a bell-curvy model like HERO still has to deal with the vagueries of randomness, and if a statistically improbable run of high dice totals happens in a circumstance where its effects are particularly pronounced - like handguns shooting at tanks, or whatnot - then that can wage a full-frontal assault on verisimilitude. 

 

As several people have pointed out, this is where military specs get dicey; we don't have reliable data on what happens when hyperkinetic energy beams impact modern vehicle armor. But bullets? We know about bullets.

 

If that's a concern, it might be a good idea to have all milspec weapons work on a standard effect model, like Massey suggested. I tend to take it setting-by-setting, so for me, it's much more about how things work in the world as portrayed. Do supers rip tanks in half in this setting? Maybe they don't in Champions; maybe it's supposed to be difficult in that world.

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In the source material, bricks routinely take apart tanks effortlessly. That this is not possible when one takes a typical Brick writeup, and a tank writeup, from the official rules indicates that the official characters are not written up properly.

Yes, they can. Just write up a collareral damage power that does NND damage to unliving objects. Done. Not difficult. And perfectly in genre.

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