Re: Sinking GEV's

Roger Books wrote:

> > How about varying the amount of armour depending on
> > whether its fast or slow GEV?
>
>I'm not sure what this would accomplish.

Nothing in DS2, since the tranny doesn't use up any explicit space
inside 
the vehicle.

>We once had a discussion here of the fact that the tanks
>in Hammer's Slammers couldn't cross water because they
>would sink.  I want to HR that affect so I can use it
>in building scenararios.  The two possible ways I can
>see going about it are:
>
>Any vehicle with more than X armour sinks.  I _believe_
>the rules say that water craft may have no more than
>3 armour so I used this as the breakpoint.

It is max Armour rating = 2 less than Vehicle Size Class (p.13). Makes 
sense - the bigger a boat is, the thicker armour you can put on it. Same

goes for hovercraft, though since they are supposed to hover above the 
water surface rather than half-way through it and thus don't displace as

much water they can't be as heavily armoured as boats.

(Yes, hovercraft do displace some water - though it is their air
cushions 
which do the displacing, not their hulls. This is usually visible on
pics 
of hovercraft moving over water.)

Brian Bilderback (welcome back, BTW!) wrote:

>Another possible route you might take is this:
>HR In order to move across water GEV's must be designed with the 
>Amphibious feature as for other land vehicles.
[...]
>In this case, don't think of the "amphibious" feature as being just a 
>watertight hull and a couple of PTO proprllers, rather, it is a design 
>feature of the GEV which allows it's skirt & propellers to displace
enough 
>water pressure to keep it from sinking.

Um, well. Put it like this: if you make the hull of an M1A2 Abrams 
completely watertight and put propellers on it, it'll still sink. Even
if 
you can keep the volume straight above the tank free from water it'll 
eventually reach a depth where the water pressure on its belly can
support 
it; I did the calculation a year or so back, but I don't remember
off-hand 
if it was 25 feet or 25 meters below the surface...

IOW, if you want an amphibious GEV with heavy armour, you have to make
it 
big enough to spread the weight of that armour over a large enough
surface 
so the "ground pressure" of the vehicle is so low that the water can 
support it. This is one of the DS2 vehicle design rules I actually agree

with <g>

Re: vehicle design system: I and Beth have made some progress over the
past 
year, but Beth has been more involved with FMA and I was side-tracked
into 
FMA-izing the DS2 damage and to-hit systems. (The damage system was
posted 
some weeks back - I think it is in the list archive by now <que:
Jerry>).

Later,

Oerjan
oerjan.ohlson@telia.com

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