Breaching vs. Cutting, Arsenal Explosives question Options

[TheOneRonin]

Greetings all. I've been familiarizing myself with the advanced explosive rules in Arsenal, and I've run into an issue. First off, let me quote a few relevant pieces of text:

Cutting requires far less explosives than breaching, but more preparation time.

Makes sense, but I can't get it to work out in practice.

Okay, lets say we are faced with a security door. That counts as Reinforced Material, so we have Structure Rating of 9, and an Armor Rating of 8.

Let's also say that we have a drone carrying 200 foam explosive canisters, each packed with 1 kilogram of Rating 4 foam explosive.


So if we decide to breach the door, lets figure out how much explosive it's going to take.

Arsenal gives us the following:

DV required = (Radius[m] x Structure Rating) + (Armor Rating ÷ 4)
Explosive weight = (DV ÷ DV Multiplier ÷ Explosives Rating)squared in kg

So to blow a 1 meter diameter hole, we need a DV of
(.5 * 9) + (8 / 4)
(4.5) + (2)
6.5 or 7 DV

Let's say we are just putting the explosives on the ground, so the Multiplier is x1.

The weight in kilograms is:
(7 / 1 / 4) squared kilograms
3 kilograms

So 3 kilos of rating 4 foam explosive will put a 1 meter diameter hole in our security door.

Good 'nuff.


So let's say instead of breaching it, we decide to try cutting it.

We are going to attempt to cut a 1 square meter hole out of the door.

We are still using rating 4 foam explosive, and we will shape it into four 1-meter lines.

The DV formula for cutting is: (sqrt of kilos/meter)*(Rating of explosives)
We also get 1 additional AP per net hit made on the demo extended test (assume no net hits, so no AP)

The door can buy 2 hits from it's armor, effectively giving it 11 damage boxes.

If we want to do 11 boxes of damage, we will need almost 9 KILOGRAMS PER ONE METER LINE!!!
DV = (sqrt 9)*(4)
DV = (3)*(4)
DV = 12

Holy shit. You need a grand total of 36 kilograms of the same explosive to cut a 1meter square hole out of that security door, whereas you only need 3 kilos to blow a 1meter diameter hole. WTF???

Please tell me my math is wrong...

[edit]
My math WAS wrong, so I fixed it. But all the correction did was change the required mass of the breaching charge from 5 kilos to 3, exacerbating the problem with the cutting charge calculation.
[/edit]