Re: SG2 vehicles vs infantry

Barclay, Tom wrote:

>Yes, when I mentioned the Armour of Achilles, I had in mind the Armour
>5 Behemoth tank taking a shot form the Throw-Me-Away-IAVR and the
>tank rolling a 1 (thus totalling 5) and the IAVR rolling a mediocre 6
and >killing it. Add in major impacts and you have a rather too-good
(IMO) >chance of an IAVR cancelling the behemoth tank. 

This of course invites the counter "but the gunner only rolls 11 one
time in 6 and he has to hit you first, so the chance for that is less
than 1 in 36" <g>

But that doesn't take the major hits into account, and at short range
they're very common even for low-grade troops. You're quite right; the
odds for IAVRs to take out super-heavy tanks from the front are
ridiculously high. If the gunner is at point-blank range, his Pkill
(disabling or brewing up) is:

Elite - 12.1%
Veteran - 11.9%
Regular - 11.2%
Green - 9.8%
Untrained - 4.0%

This doesn't include the system or mobility damage Peter Mancini
referred to, BTW.

While I can accept that an Elite trooper probably could disable a tank
frontally, I'd expect him to do it by hitting sights or similar systems
rather than by penetrating the frontal armour :-/ 

I canNOT accept that a *Green* trooper will destroy or completely
disable a super-heavy tank frontally almost 10% of the time, however!
Especially not if the target has ERA and/or point defences, but such
systems seem to be absent in SGII :-(

>From the side or rear the above kill probabilities are probably too
*low* instead - they definitely are when looking at today's tanks which
only really protect the frontal arc against heavy weapons, but
tomorrow's tanks will probably be better protected in the other arcs
than today's are. Too many top- or side-striking weapons around for
anything else :-/

>Some people like having a GMS/P able to kill an armour 5 tank. I'm
>wondering if this would happen in DS2 as easily as it can (I've seen
it >enough times... armour 3-5 proving useless against a class 1
weapon) >in SG2? 

GMS/P doesn't exist in DS2, instead being "baked into" the IAVR (or
possibly GMS/L) category. IAVRs have an 8% chance to knock out an
Armour-5 tank frontally in DSII; this drops slightly (to 7%) if the
target has ERA or APFC. Not quite as bad as in SGII, but still nasty...
the main difference though is that in DSII the tanks can often choose
to stay away from the infantry; in SGII they can't <g>

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