Re: [FT] various subsystems (arc specific armor)

Bell, Brian K wrote:

>>>Before FB1, I (among others) came up with ablative armor ideas
>>>(see http://members.nbci.com/rlyehable/ft/techlibrary/armor.html). 

Interesting. A couple of rather... strange features of this are:

- No matter how big the ship is, 1 point of damage blows the ablative
layer off an entire face of the ship. This means a given thickness of
ablative armour mounted on a corvette can absorb much more damage than
the same thickness of ablative armour mounted on a superdreadnought.
The PSB explains this feature, but the PSB does *not* explain why the
ablative armour isn't designed like modern reactive and ceramic armours
- ie., in fairly small panels, for the explicit purpose of *not* having
an entire armour layer crumble when a single spot is hit.

- The relationship between the TMF and the amount of armour points
provided by one Mass of armour seems to assume pretty weird hull shapes
for some of the ship classes. Specifically, the very large and very
small ships (60-100 and 2-10) need to be much longer and thinner than
the mid-sized ones to get the number of armour boxes per Mass you've
specified.

Of course, if the rule is just an abstraction which doesn't claim to
directly model a physical reality, these points are completely moot...
though the detailed PSB kinda implies that it *does* claim this :-7

[snip]

>>You're trying to translate a rather abstract concept ("hull
>>integrity") to a very real physical property (armour thickness). If
you
>>want accurate formulae for how volume and surface area affect
>>armour mass, you should play Brilliant Lances rather than Full
Thrust.
>> 
>>If the armour mechanism is *non*-ablative, like eg. real-world
>>armour, FT screens and MT Kra'Vak armour, its Mass should be related
to
>>the Mass of the ship... just like the FT screens are. This type of
>>mechanic "simulates" the behavior of the armour in each individual
point
>>instead of the overall breakdown of the hull integrity the FT damage 
>>system uses. 
>
>[Bri] This is exactly what I am saying. 

Since you quoted both of my above paragrafs, I assume you meant to
include both in "this". It bears repeating:

"You're trying to translate a rather abstract concept ("hull
integrity") to a very real physical property (armour thickness). If you
want accurate formulae for how volume and surface area affect armour
mass, you should play Brilliant Lances rather than Full Thrust."

If this was exactly what you were saying, why did you then continue
with a long section where you keep trying to translate the FT "hull
integrity" concept directly into armour thickness?

The FT hull boxes are an abstraction. A real vehicle - ship, tank,
spacecraft, whatever - doesn't have a magic number where you can say
"if it is hit by exactly this many shots, it'll be destroyed" - yet you
seem to be satisfied with this abstraction, since you don't complain
about hull boxes being used instead of the more realistic (note:
"*more* realistic", not "realistic") systems used in FASA's Renegade
Legion or GDW's Brillant Lances. FT armour boxes are part of exactly
the same abstraction, but in their case you want considerably less
abstraction? 

>>'Twas over two years since I played with arc-limited armour, but
>>when I did I used 3 single-arc boxes per Mass. With the "roll ship"
rule
>>it was quite easy to keep your best-armoured side facing the enemy
>>even with quite slow ships in Cinematic; it would be even easier in
>>Vector. Together with multi-arc weapons, this increased the amount of
>>damage needed to kill ships quite impressively.
> 
>[Bri] You did not indicate what you thought a valid rate for 
>arc specific armor would be.

Definitely no more than 3 boxes per Mass, and even then I'm sorely
tempted to increase its points cost to 3xMass. 2 boxes per Mass may be
appropriate for vector.

>With the roll maneuver, 2 may be enough, would I would think that it
would
>fall toward 3.
>An even exchange rate is obviously a loss to use arc specific.
>At 2, you have 120 degree coverage, and only gain if they hit
>BOTH arcs.
>At 3, you have 180 degree coverage, but only gain on the exchange
>if they hit 2 or more arcs.

Depends entirely on how you distribute your armour. If it is all evenly
spread around your ship you want the enemy to hit more than one of your
arcs, but as I wrote above it's not very hard to force them to do that
(as
long as your own weapons are multi-arc so you get to shoot back). If
your
armour is *not* evenly spread out but is concentrated in a few arcs,
you
want the enemy to hit that arc only - can be hard to force in Cinematic
on a
small table, but almost trivial on a large table as long as your
engines are
thrust-6 or better, or if you're playing Vector.

>>>Out on a Limb:
>>>Or you could adapt the current protection scheme:
>>>Armor provides 6 points of protection. 1 per arc per armor mass. A
>>>ship also gains a bonus of +0.3 per arc of reduced protection
>>>(ARP). 
>>>APRs must be ship-wide to gain bonus. 
>> 
>>What do you mean with "ship-wide" here? Obviously not "all around
>>the ship"... or is "APR" something else than "ARP", and if so what?
>> 
>> ...and why do you get the bonus mass at all?
> 
>[Bri] It may not be necessary at all. I was trying to figure an
>incentive to use arc specific armor. However, as you pointed out, with
the
>roll maneuver, and depending on the exchange rate, it may have
>enough incentive built in.

Yep. Imagine a Kra'Vak cruiser with 1 Mass of armour in its (F) arc:
with
your version it'd get 6-8 armour boxes, and all of them cover the arc
facing
the enemy during the initial attack run...

Regards,

Oerjan Ohlson
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
- Hen3ry