Before FB1, I (among others) came up with ablative armor ideas (see
http://members.nbci.com/rlyehable/ft/techlibrary/armor.html).
Armor could be applied to each arc. I had the amount of protection based on
ship mass (as a given ton of armor on a smaller vessel would provide more
protection than the same ton of armor spread over a larger vessel [i.e.
thicker armor]).
When presented to the list, it was deemed to provide too much protection,
which is probably the case.
I was disappointed in FB1 that a ton of armor gave no more protection when
applied to a corvette than to a superdreadnought. Take a Nanuchuka and a
Komorov. Over 10x the mass and more than that in surface volume (compare the
miniatures). Each mass of armor would be at least 10x thicker on the Nanuchka
as the Komorov, but it provides the same 1 pip of protection. It should have
been based on percent of ship mass (at least in part as the screens are). But
I seen no way to correct this without invalidating the existing SSDs. [heavy
sigh]
Given the current system, I am unsure what to suggest.
My gut reaction was to say 3 per specific arc, but this may be too little.
6 seems too many as it provides much more protection just by turning the hull
slightly. But with the number of penetration weapons (beams,
K-Guns,
etc.) it may not be the case.
4 may be reasonable. Provides less protection than standard armor, but may be
distributed to reinforce a specific arc.
Perhaps Orejan has statistics from play-testing to provide the value of
overall protection to specific arc protection.
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. Bonus points may NOT be placed in any ARP. If a
ship has both 5 arc and 2-4 arc ARPs the 2-4 arc ARPs must be within the
5 arc ARP. Thus:
ARPs Protection Pips per mass:
0-1 6
2-4 7*
5 8**
* To gain the bonus points, the same 2 arcs ship-wide must be of reduced
protection.
** To gain the bonus points, the same 5 arcs ship-wide must be of
reduced protection.
Probably, the base should be reduced to 4 and gain 1 for each ton of armor
with 3 ARPs and gain an additional 1 for each ton of armor with 5 ARPs. But
this would require choosing which ARPs existing ships have.
To confuse the matter with an example: Richthofen BC has 6 armor points. Using
the new system, it would have 6 points of protection per arc (1 per armor
mass):
6
---
6 / \ 6
/ \
\ /
6 \ / 6
---
6
If it took 3 mass of the armor and reinforced the FP,F,FS arcs of the ship, it
would gain 3 points to place in the FP,F,FS arcs:
10
---
10 / \ 10
/ \
\ /
3 \ / 3
---
3
It has the same 3 ARPS (AS,A,AP). It could redistribute the 3 mass of armor to
reinforce AP,FP,F and F,FS,AS but would not gain any bonus pips as the ship
would not have the same ARPs:
9
---
6 / \ 6
/ \
\ /
6 \ / 6
---
3
It could place 3 mass of armor in the F arc to gain an extra 6 armor pips:
27
---
3 / \ 3
/ \
\ /
3 \ / 3
---
3
This ship has 5 ARPs (FS,AS,A,AP,FP) But could place 1 mass of armor in FP, 1
in F and one in FS, but would only gain 3 extra pips as the ship shares only 3
APRs (it would be the same as the second example), and thus gain 3, not 6 more
points.
11
---
11 / \ 11
/WRONG\
\=====/
3 \ / 3
---
3
It could take 2 mass of armor to reinforce FP,F,FS (ARPs of AS,A,AP) and 1
mass of armor to additionally reinforce F (ARPs of FS,AS,A,AP,FP) to produce
the following:
17
---
7 / \ 7
/ \
\ /
3 \ / 3
---
3
All the EXTRA pips had to be placed in the F arc (the only non ARP on the
ship).
> Blel, Biarn K wrote:
> Before FB1, I (among others) came up with ablative armor ideas (see
[snip]
> But I seen no way to correct this without invalidating the existing
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.
Tying the Mass of *ablative* armour to the ship's volume forces makes the
armour worth comparatively less on the large ship than on the small ship
(since 1 point worth of armour gives more protection to the small ship). The
result in the game is that small ships get heavily armoured,
while large capitals don't get armoured at all - it's simply not
cost-effective. If this is this what you intended then that's fine;
personally I find it rather bass-ackwards though.
> Perhaps Orejan has statistics from play-testing to provide the value
Who's "Orejan"? No such person on the list AFAIK.
'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.
> Out on a Limb:
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?
Regards,
> -----Original Message-----
[Bri] This is exactly what I am saying. The armor in full thrust has
no relationship to the ship on which it is placed. One mass of armor provides
the same protection on a courier as on the Dread Pirate Roberts. Unless the
armor is moble and moves to intercept the weapon attacking the ship, it must
be spread out to cover the whole ships (or at least the vulnerable parts if
you take the view that only the vulnerable parts are modled by the damage
boxes), thus reducing the thickness of the armor as it is applied over a
larger surface area. This being the case, unless it has some PSB that spreads
the damage equally throughout the armor, a thin layer of armor cannot provide
the same protection as a thick layer of the same armor.
> Tying the Mass of *ablative* armour to the ship's volume forces makes
[Bri] True it does not model wet navies. Partly because a ship has to
worry about displacing the mass of the armor. If you took the armor off of a
WW2 battleship and put it on a coast guard cutter, the cutter would probably
sink. Add to this the relative fragileness of the cutter, and it makes it more
cost effective to put it on the Battleship. However, the protection provided
the cutter (if it did not sink) would greater than when it was spread over the
Battleship. In the same way, if you took the armor off of a frigate and used
it to armor a battleship, the battleship
would have very poor armor. Now you could argue that armor is less effective
on smaller ship because the hull of the smaller ship does not stand up to the
punishment even through the armor. But this is already modled by the number
and layout of the hull boxes as well as the way that
Pulse Torpedos work (1/2 armor 1/2 hull boxes).
> >Perhaps Orejan has statistics from play-testing to provide the value
[Bri] Sorry, I transposed letters. [bow and scrape].
> 'Twas over two years since I played with arc-limited armour, but when
[Bri] You did not indicate what you thought a valid rate for
arc specific armor would be. 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.
> >Out on a Limb:
[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.
> Regards,
My response marked by [Bri]
---
> > >I was disappointed in FB1 that a ton of armor gave no more
The only PSB I can think of for this is that the "armor" isn't actually
armor--it's more like chaff, or Traveller "sand", tossed out to block
incoming fire. That would also account for why the K guns go through it so
easily.
> Bell, Brian K wrote:
> Before FB1, I (among others) came up with ablative armor ideas
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
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
rule
> it was quite easy to keep your best-armoured side facing the enemy
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
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:
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,