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.

> At 05:45 PM 5/8/97 -0400, you wrote:

I have never really liked kravak (sp) armor, It seems to me that the current
rules prevent a HIT, the same a shields. shields prevent a hit, armor should
absorb damage before more vital systems. eventually, if you fire enough shots,
you will damage the M1, even if it is only to immobilize it.

> On Fri, 9 May 1997, Marshall Grover wrote:

> I have never really liked kravak (sp) armor, It seems to me that the

That's true. Many games, especially RPG derived ones, make the rather abstract
assumption that everything is under the same protection. This not true for
small objects like men or tanks, and even less so for large

targets like warships.

Sometimes the level of abstraction in the game itself justifies this.

IMHO, FT is abstract enough for armor to work in this fashion. After all,
the very basic weapons have integrated to-hit and damage rolls, and no
amount of protection makes a target completely immune.

Whether it is desirable to have armor work the same as screens, mechanicswise,
is another question mostly dependent on one's personal taste.