Trencher

A general thought about ranged weapons: the amount of energy an arrow or spear has drops away quickly over distance. While an arrow may go straight through padded armour at short range, it (the armour) might be quite effective at a distance.
 
That might suggest a horrible level of complication, so maybe it should be left alone 

Most definitely, tweak away at the rules! Depending on the tone of the game I'm running, sometimes I want those gritty realistic rules and other times I don't bother to stat something out because the specific game mechanic is unimportant. Yeah, I could "build a starship with FTL travel" or I could say "it works, you arrived, travel was otherwise uneventful".
 
With armour and weapons, there is a lot of granularity that could be added. One of the things I've been thinking about is how to differentiate characters in a sword and sorcery type setting. Being a specialist in one specific unique weapon is one way of accomplishing that. But we would need more development of weapons to make them unique and interesting

Its less dire than portrayed, but to what extent it is an issue, the rebuild of KA damage we did makes all the difference.

That's the thing!  That's what I _think_ is at the center of this discussion:
 
What credit is given to the padding?  What is the armor that is not padded armor?  How well does armor _without_ the padded underlayers offer to the wearer?   How could armor be better modeled to reflect these realities?
 
Will we ever get a perfect simulation of real armor?  No; of course not.  I can't think of a single gaming system that takes a long hard look at physics (except possibly Universe, and then really only with regards to spaceship travel) and drafts rules that follow them.
 
 
But that doesn't mean that we can't strive to use the existing system to create a model that is more accurate than what we have now.
 
Sure: it won't translate to D&D or a thousand other games, if only because HERO does armor and deals with damage much differently than do most other systems.  That still doesn't mean we shouldn't like to see some tweaks to what we're currently doing. 
 
 

I feel the same way about weapons: could they be modeled better, with greater distinction between each type?  How can we make an axe feel cool but a sword feel cool in a different way, so they both are attractive in different situations?  How can we make different bows matter other than just a few DC difference in damage?

I agree, but as someone here just very recently pointed out, there is a serious scaling problem at the low end.  HERO shows its superhero roots when you try to really differentiate the "mere mortal" end of the scale.
 
The easiest option is to decimate _everything_, but that leads to depressing things like "this sword can average 1.15 BODY while this arrow can average 1.7 !", etc, etc.  (yeah: I tried this once.  Mathematically, it works, but it really doesn't _feel_ like anything.  Alternatively, multiply everything by ten, but that's really just roll under / roll over, applied to other parts of the game. 
 
I don't know if you've read it, but one of the most depressing HERO-compatible things you will ever read is Guns! Guns! Guns!  and it's sequel.....    
 

I thought that was sad and lazy storytelling.
 
The pirates could almost have been doable since if he convinced Yondu, the rest would follow the captain as long as they got paid on a regular basis.
 
But Thanos?
 
> gag <

In the movie Starlord were just some goof that fell into different adventures and had to be saved by his friends all the time. 
His chief virtue was that: "He is not a complete dick".
Starlords iconic status (if it is iconic at all) only exist to us the viewers, the rest of the universe sees him as a nuisance. 
Its not exactly a role that needs to be filled in the eyes of the people. This is a step down for the Black Panther character who popularity is about him being an African high tech king and hero. With the whole lost world aesthetic going on. If anything him going to space should lead to a Wakandan space empire like they have in the comics, not him being a rouge trading adventurer! No matter how much more successful he is at it than Quill was. Because Quill kinda suck. He has lots of flaws. His approach if you can even call it that have nothing in common with Tchalla at all and those two would definitively not go on similar paths. Black Panther in space should be something way grander and more epic than just "same as Quill but more successful".
I cant get over the fact that this is just executives playing around with different brands. 
 
And I tell you something else. While "What if" had lots of good stories over the years they also had a lot of bad and I think this "what if blue hat man put on a red hat"  kind of approach to stories infected the mainstream comics too and made them worse.
 
Time travel- Alternative dimensions - Alternative timelines - All mean two things. We are going away from the streets. "The world outside your window" and we are just getting the same characters over and over again just in different variations. These two factors wounded the comics long before the usual suspects came along to finish them off. A wound I suspect did a lot more damage than the casual observer thinks.
 
 

A portal gun.

I’d have to agree. I used to spend about $50 a month for comic books, even after I moved to L. A. but that tapered of to less than  $10 after 2007, then mostly independents. It dropped to nothing in 2016. The old writers and artists aren’t around much any more and the quality of writing is just awful, especially in the last 4 years. 

In the movie Starlord were just some goof that fell into different adventures and had to be saved by his friends all the time. 
His chief virtue was that: "He is not a complete dick".
Starlords iconic status (if it is iconic at all) only exist to us the viewers, the rest of the universe sees him as a nuisance. 
Its not exactly a role that needs to be filled in the eyes of the people. This is a step down for the Black Panther character who popularity is about him being an African high tech king and hero. With the whole lost world aesthetic going on. If anything him going to space should lead to a Wakandan space empire like they have in the comics, not him being a rouge trading adventurer! No matter how much more successful he is at it than Quill was. Because Quill kinda suck. He has lots of flaws. His approach if you can even call it that have nothing in common with Tchalla at all and those two would definitively not go on similar paths. Black Panther in space should be something way grander and more epic than just "same as Quill but more successful".
I cant get over the fact that this is just executives playing around with different brands. 
 
And I tell you something else. While "What if" had lots of good stories over the years they also had a lot of bad and I think this "what if blue hat man put on a red hat"  kind of approach to stories infected the mainstream comics too and made them worse.
 
Time travel- Alternative dimensions - Alternative timelines - All mean two things. We are going away from the streets. "The world outside your window" and we are just getting the same characters over and over again just in different variations. These two factors wounded the comics long before the usual suspects came along to finish them off. A wound I suspect did a lot more damage than the casual observer thinks.
 
 

As George Carlin used to observe, "You drive in a car, but you fly on a 'plane. I don't know about you, but I want to fly IN the 'plane. Let Evel Knievel fly on the 'plane!"

Also from personal experience:  
 
 
I took a 121 mph header with just my leathers on (give me a break: it was 109degrees; I was standing and racing on black asphalt and the padding was _miserable_, so I snuck off to shuck it before my heat came up).
 
Leather offers protection against abrasion, period.  There is _zero_ impact resistance to leather, no matter how cool it looks.  I had more purple and green skin than I did any of my natural skin tones.   I think the only reason I didn't break anything is because it was a low-side slide; that is, there wasn't much of a fall, just a lot of rolling and bumping.   

Padded armor is going to be somewhat more effective against blunt weapons, and less so against edged and piercing weapons, but most games don't make a distinction there, so you get the average defense which isn't spectacular.  And let me qualify this by saying I have no real world experience here, but that is my perception.
 
But the real problem with padded armor is that it generally has the similar defensive value to soft leather which has a lot more sex appeal.  Really, do you want your rakish rogue character to be dressed in black leather or something that looks like a canvas quilt? 😁
 
Soft leather can also often pass as clothes while padded armor generally can't, which limits where you can wear it.  That said, I have allowed characters to purchase (or be gifted) expensive padded armor made by highly skilled artisans that look like courtier's clothes but have the defensive bonuses of padded armor.

Ooh!  
 
Something I can answer based on real-world experience!
 
Yes.
 
Padded armor is, in every system I have ever played, insanely underrated.
 
I say that because my racing gear was, essentially, padded armor.
 
For those who do not know this already:
 
From the time I was twelve until I was twenty-nine, I raced dirt bikes.  (I preferred enduro and cross-country to track racing, but I entered pretty much anything within a 36-hour driving range from home, so long as I could pony up entry fees.)  From the time I was nineteen until I was forty-two, I dragged raced bikes.  (Yes; there was significant period of overlap.  What can I say?  To this day, I _love_ motorcycles, and still ride them-- body's too stove up to race them these days, but I still ride them.)
 
I will spare you all the great stories because-- well, because most people aren't as interested in the same things the way we might hope they are.   
 
A case can be made (a bad case, mind you) that dirt bike armor is more akin to plate armor, but the fact it that it is not: it's plastic, and can easily be wrecked with pretty much anything with an edge and a little bit of mass-- such as a sword or a hatchet.  When the discussion comes up, I tend to feel it might be akin to boiled leather over heavy padding, but even boiled leather is more "sword resistant" than is plastic.
 
Drag racing armor, though: that is straight-up padded armor under -- well, traditionally leather, but since the mid nineties more and more synthetics have slipped in, and today the vast majority of racers are competing in padded suits under a synthetic shell.   Before drawing the leather armor comparison, I want to point out that the leather or synthetic shells-- even the plastic plating on dirt bike armor, for the most part-- offer _nothing_ in the way of impact protection or sword protection or whatever (dirt bike armor _does_ get props against the gravel and dirt clods being flung from the wheels of other bikes, though) and are intended to protect the padding from the abrasion of the road, period.
 
Now it's pretty obvious that as I've never been to big regional or national events or been featured on television or even at big "name brand" races, I was one of those guys who spent a lot of time either not being in a race (for various work or finance-related reasons) or being _in_ the race, but _off_ the bike.   Being off the bike though, does not always mean being off the _track_   .  There is no feeling quite as confusing or disorienting as running somewhere over a hundred mph, feeling the tail whip (which usually isn't what happened: usually the front end folds, but your perspective makes you interpret it incorrectly), the horizon does a barrel roll and you completely lose track  of it for a minute, then you hear your helmet grinding away as you skip and flop until you can figure out where your limbs are and then bring them in as tight and still as you can (yes; that causes you to conserve momentum you want to shed, but you don't want to do it at the expense of broken limbs, so you do what you can).  You slide-- sort of-- down the track, usually bumping, thumping, tumbling, and generally not sliding (unless you can afford one of the fifteen-hundred-dollar top end synthetic sets of armor, of course).  At the end of this beating, even after being thrown at the ground at hundred plus, unless you broke a bone, you're fine.  I mean _fine_!  Ready to break out the spare bike if you didn't disqualify and run again!
 
Sure: if the fasteners fail and you expose your natural hide, you're going to have serious road rash here and there, and that'll drop your mood a lot, and in thirty minutes or so, you're going to feel a _lot_ of bruises if it was an off-road event and something got under your plates while you were bumping and thumping (usually because you fastened them incorrectly), but you're likely going to be "unhurt" in a "can I continue fighting?  Did I take any BODY damage?  Did I take _serious_ STUN?
 
 
It may be a poor analogy; I don't know, but based on my own experience, I have felt that padded armor is always _horribly_ short-shafted in games, at least again non-pointy weapons.  (note that I say "non-pointy" as opposed to non-edged: I think that it should do better against large edged-weapons as well (save maybe the Japanese katanas or "lop off a limb because it's just that sharp" kind of swords-- wait!  Didn't samurai go into battle against exactly those weapons wearing essentially padded armor?)
 
 
 
 

Isn’t armors such as Plate also assume that you are wearing Padded Armor too? 

I think padded armor is mostly seen as training armor where the attacker is using a blunt wooden sword.

"Now all restaurants are Taco Bell."

This would mean they are ahead of the curve in negotiations, when the contract period ends in Hollywood, and the talent strikes begin.  I am going  to be verrry interested in how the writer's negotiations proceed.

I just learned this existed. Edvard Munch, The Murderer

It's surprising most of these didn't make it into fantasy rpgs. Since my favorite wasn't included in the video, here's a bonus entry.
 
 

THE OTHER HALF IS EXTREME VIOLENCE

AND KNOWING IS HALF THE BATTLE!
 
(Ooops!  Wrong toy commercial.  .  .)

I understand a lot of what you are saying. 
 
There used to be at least one or two series on TV that were interesting. 
I haven't seen anything even remotely decent in several years and most of that has been one off's on a streaming service.
Occasionally there will be a season one show that can be pretty good, but then at season two or after the season one mid-season break the makers decide that they have hooked you and either fall back on the same mind-numbingly predictable and BORING "evil corporation dark conspiracy the earth is boiling" plot or just abandon story all together so they can launch their "x group is evil" social agenda. 
 
I have just lost all patience and refuse to give utter garbage a pass because they insert a few key phrases and words.
A good story can also promote a concept or stance and because it is a good story be great entertainment because it has an actual good storyline.
And agenda with a thin veneer sprayed over the top is still garbage because there is no storyline outlining an actual good story.  
 
I've worked a pig farm before. 
And it isn't that "Movies and TV haven't gotten worse, our standards have gotten higher." 
It is "we have been covered in pig shit for so long we no longer smell the stench."