Armour

	I have been following the armour thread on ships armour and had
some
ideas and observations. There seem to be two aspects of armour that
people
are trying to model for FT/MT. The first aspect which the Kra'Vak armour
represents very well is rigidity. You can either damage the ship after
penetrating the armour or you scratch the paint and nothing else. No in
between. This models Tank armour pretty well I think. If you can punch a
whole in an M1 then you can really screw it up. Punching a whole is very
difficult.
	The other aspect of armour that is being discussed is ablative
armour. You hit something and damage it but it has plenty of stuffing so
that it can withstand that easily. Runways are often designed to be
compressed dirt with steel reinforced concrete on top and finally
layered
with armour plate. I may be wrong but I think that describes the runway
at
Ke San in Vietnam fairly well. It survived heavy bombardment and was
relatively easily fixed after each assault. These systems don't shrug
off a
shot without noticeable change; a shell striking a concrete/steel/dirt
runway will leave a crater. It will probably not penetrate though.
Similarly this is a quality shown by ships by having increased
compartmentalization, armoured internal bulkheads and improved damage
control/fire fighting equipment. An american cruiser in our modern navy
may
survive a strike by an anti-ship missile, but there will be a whole in
the
ship. The present 1 mass cost 2 per point added to DP, to the ship
armour
seems to be a good representation of this. (there was an incident during
the
Iran-Iraq war where an american ship suffered an Exocet missile hit and
survived, with a significant loss in fighting ability and several lives)
	All that said I think we should have both systems. With a small
change to the Kra'Vak armour. Rigid armour when penetrated tends to
loose
structural integrity. I think a good way to represent this is to simply
add
a system that sustains threshold rolls to the Kra'vak ships that
represents
the strength of the armour. One system for each level of armour.

	
=============================================================
Mark Donelan		      
E-mail: Mark_Donelan@vis.com  Vicorp Interactive Systems, Inc.
Phone : (617) 859-1293	      399 Boylston Street
FAX   : (617) 536-6647	      Boston, MA 02116-3305