MBT Stats for SR4 Options

[Crusher Bob]

Erm, since there are no canon stats for tanks in SR, any tank stats would be house rules! :D Might as well make them house rules that let you use google to supply stats for stuff. The main trick is to make the actual damage the heavy weapons do a fraction of the AP values, which greatly reduces the 'ping or death problem with canon SR heavy weapons.

So, on the same scale:

5.56 NATO 5(-5) (Assault Rifle)
50 BMG 8(-12) (HMG)
25mm HEDP 9(-27) (assault canon)
M72 LAW 35(-315)
AT4 LAW 50(-450)
etc

And if you want to add damage for another weapon, fire up google with 'weapon name' RHA penetration and plug it in. There'll be some fiddling for how much of the total should be damage and how much should be AP value, but for the weapons from 100mm to 1000mm of RHA penetration 10% of the penetration as damage and the remaining 90% as AP value seem to work out ok. (See my thread for some of the math behind these numbers).

[hyzmarca]

[Crusher Bob]

But notice the scale problem. An APC has roughly 25mm of armor. A tank has roughly 600mm of armor. If you compress the scale at the top, that means that you start to find that adepts can punch through over half a meter of armored steel!

Not compressing the scale means that adepts and trollbows can possibly be made to take out APCs (armor 24), but not tanks (armor 600).

[Ol' Scratch]

[hyzmarca]

And that is a huge problem. At that point, however, a new scale will work far better than absurd amounts of dice can. I mean, if a tank had 600 armor then all GMs who want to use tanks would be required to own 600 d6s and a bucket to hold them all.

[Crusher Bob]

That's part of the reason that all the heavy weapons have such high AP values, to reduce the number of dice you'd be rolling.

Assuming an APC (body 12, armor 24/24/24) is the biggest thing you'll actually be rolling for (and you'll be trading out 1/3 on anything much bigger) then shooting it with an HMG (8(-16)) means you'd roll it's body (12) plus the remaining armor of 8, for a total of 20 dice. Not that big a deal, as plenty of characters roll 20 dice all the time.

Even if you actually wanted to roll for the ground tank (body 60 armor 600 on the front) vs the ground tank gun (65(-585)) you'd 'only' be rolling 75 dice, not several hundred. Any heavy weapon that would leave that much armor would not penetrate anyway.

Since SR combat should not involve tanks on a regular basis, I'd prefer rules that allow google values to be plugged into the rules without a lot of sweating.

[WearzManySkins]

[Ol' Scratch]

Eh?

The CAS Stonewall was just a heavy thunderbird, only a class above an Aztechnology Lobo (a medium t-bird), which was one class above a GMC Banshee (light). The difference between the Banshee and Lobo was that the Banshee was faster but the Lobo had three more points of armor (21 vs. the 18 on the Banshee); the other stat differences were all but non-existant.

So if you want to extrapolate that into game terms -- as opposed to making random, broken shit up because you fancy yourself an armchair military engineer -- a GMC Banshee with +6 armor = CAS Stonewall.

And 24 points of Vehicular Armor is massive in the current game. To the point where an AV missile can't hurt it (24 armor -6 AP = 18... two points greater than the 16P damage the missile does). Which, in and of itself, makes it pretty damn broken under the current rules. There's a reason 18 and 20 are the highest armor ratings on a vehicle.

[WearzManySkins]

[Crusher Bob]

You keep repeating that my proposed values are broken, but you've yet to actually make an argument as to why they are broken.

I'll put forth the following arguments about why the current rules are broken:

Damage on the character 'scale' increased linearly, while armor on the high scale does not. This can lead to oddities like trollbows and adept punches being able to do more damage that anti-tank missiles and tank cannon.

Under my proposed system, damage scales linearly as long as you are willing to plug in the numbers.

Damage on the high end currently suffers from the problem of 'ping or death' either an attack does not penetrate the armor or it does and kills the target.

Under my proposed system, the majority of a weapons anti-armor penetration comes from its AP value, meaning that the numbers for armor and damage can be tweaked to provide the damage you want for most attack that get through.

There is no real way beyond the seat of the pants to convert some modern vehicle or anti-armor weapon into the SR rules.

Under my system, a quick google will give you values in the right neighborhood.

---------

So, where exactly do you contend that my proposed rules are broken?

[Ol' Scratch]

[Crusher Bob]

The problem with most scaling systems is that they break down at the boundary conditions. Exactly how much bigger/more heavily armored does a vehicle have to become to get the scale bonus? If a Stonewall doesn't qualify for the scaled up then what is the smallest vehicle that does? What happens when that vehicle shoots a stonewall?

Adding a scaling value of 10x for heavy weapons reduced that large numbers that seem to be scaring you, so a tank might have body 6, armor 60/30/10 and with main gun do 6(-54) if we scale by ten, but that is just a trivial simplification of the math involved.

The advantage of using real world numbers is that you have to spend considerably less effort thinks about the evolution of weapons and defenses. If an ATGM can't take out a stonewall (which is now over 15 years old) then why haven't they built bigger ATGMs? If a stonewall can carry armor X, what can't a tank that dosen't have to fly carry armor of X +Y? And why can't my ATGMs kill those tanks? If I do make ATGMs that can take out the armor X + Y tanks, then everyone will complain that the stonewalls armor is worthless. After all, it doesn't stop and of the few published anti-tank weapons.

I created the house rules so that you had access to the whole plethora of modern weapons and armor, so that if you needed quick stats for APC X in country Z, you look up what APC country Z uses and can use those values.

I wanted to avoid all the questions about drone weapons systems since it quickly becomes 'my drones and your drones roll some dice' whoever loses will never know it, since they got killed so fast.

[Ol' Scratch]

[Crusher Bob]

I never advocated rolling that many dice. I said that anything over APCs should just trade it at 1 hit per 3 dice. This sort of combat should not come up in SR enough that rolling the dice would matter too much.

So the ground based tank shooting another ground based tank in the front, within 1000 meters, looks like:

Damage 65(-585) (pen total 650)

vs

Body 60 armor 600 (condition monitor 38)

The armor is penetrated. 15 dice of armor remain for resistance. This give the tank a soak of 75 dice. Divided by 3 gets 25 hits. This means that the tank takes 40 hits and is destroyed. (Tank withing a 1000 meters kill each other with one hit).

A stonewall (flying tank, with it's light gun shoot at the ground based tank:

Damage 60(-540) (pen total 600)

vs

Body 60 armor 600 (condition monitor 38)

The armor is penetrated. 60 dice of armor remain for resistance. This gives the tank a soak of 120 dice. Divided by 3 gets 40 hits. This means that the tank takes 20 hits. The stonewall has to shoot the ground based tank twice to destroy it.

This produces simplistic results that the GM can compute ahead of time, so that the actual part of the game involving the runners (and not the tanks) can continue.

[Fortune]

I'm not understanding why it just can't have 24 (or 26 or even 30) Armor. I mean, if there is nothing in the game (other than wallhacker Trolls) that can penetrate that level of armor, why do we need add ridiculous levels of scaling (based on real world stats forced on top of non-realistic game world stats) that totally complicate matters? Like I said, I'm just not getting the rationale.

[Ol' Scratch]

Exactly my point.

[Crusher Bob]

Because using real world values give you both an 'evolved' set of attacks and defenses, allows you to insert any vehcile you want into the game and have it fit in 'properly', lets you stat up as many different armored vehicles as you can google up some numbers for...

If we assume that the citymaster is a light APC (equivalent to the M113) how much more armor should an heavy APC/IFV have (Bradley or BMP3). How about something like the Israeli Namera (Old tank converted to APC duty).

If I decide I want to model a heavy IFV with twice as much armor as the citymaster, how much armor should it have? 40 is twice as much as the citymasters armor, but that means that the published anti-tank weapons won't even scratch it! So the facile assumption of twice as much armor is actually equal to twice as much armor seems to fail right off the bat.

If we learn that a MBT should have around 30x or more armor on the front than an APC, what stats should I give the tank? What stats should I give anti-tank weapons so that they can, you know, actually kill tanks.

I doubt a SR source book publishing a long list of stats for armored vehicles and anti-vehicle weapons will be published, so a house rule system that makes it as easy as possible to add new vehicles would be ideal.

Making the system that you can drop real world values into means that all this is generally a google search away; and you avoid the 'whoops, that's indestructible' when you stats a vehicle up.

[Ol' Scratch]

[knasser]

I've got to weigh in here in support of Funkenstein's ideas. The best way to handle this is to find comparable things in previous sourcebooks and then use our rosetta stones such as the Ares Citymaster to get a rough idea of how to convert them. Giving things armour values of 120+ is wildly off the scale of the SR4 rules. Doing a quick binomial distribution of an antivehicular missile from SR4 (16P, -6AP vs. vehicles), gives me a 0.017% chance of damaging it. And that's your panzer from WWII.

When the consequences of your logic are that far off, then we can deduce that there is a flaw in the logic.

On the subject of tanks in general however, be prepared for the inevitable fire elemental trying to materialise inside it. My personal solution - make the tank solid and entirely automated.

[Fortune]

[knasser]

[Fortune]

Yeah, I have the pdf ... I'm just lazy. ;)

So, what's Crackerjakk think a Stonewall's stats should be?

[knasser]

[Fortune]

[Crusher Bob]

How many tank stats have been published in the various incarnations of the RBB? How many different APCs, how many Recon vehicles, etc? Are they all in the same edition? What if I want to stat up a ____? Are the rules 'gamable' if you stick them all together?

Also, my proposed rules actually scale rather well. If you start by changing assault rifle rounds from 6 (-1) to 5(-5) and use the penetration total as mm of RHA penetrated, you can plug in google values as high up as you want to go.

The actual damage values of the smaller anti-tank weapons (like the assault cannon) are kept rather small so that they are conceivably survivable by characters. But if you get hit by a tank gun, you need to HOG no matter what scale its on. For a guy with body 4 wearing an armored jacket 16(-6) is just as unsurvivable as 50(-450). And if you let a soak troll into your game with something like 18 body and 24 armor, there are still plenty of weapons that will kill him. In SR4 we takes around 4 damage + successes vs the heaviest weapon in the game! (the 16(-6) missile).

So, to use this scale, you make a minor changes to common weapons (the assault rifles, and anything bigger). The uncommon weapons (HMG, Assault cannon, all AV weapons) are all then recalibrated to work on the new scale and you only really notice a difference if you start shooting at tanks.

A HMG does something like 8(-12) (50 BMG penetrates around 20mm RHA)

The assault cannon does something like 9(-27) 25mm HEDP (penetrates 36+mm RHA)

A vehicle mounted autocannon (25-30mm) firing APFSDS-T will penetrate around somewhere around 60mm RHA, so we'll try giving it 15(-45) (though 10(-50) might work just as well).

And I can keep pulling up stats for weapons as long as google will keep giving me the answers. And I can stat out just about any vehicle, and I can be sure that the armor values and penetration are on the same scale.

If I want a vehicle that has twice as much armor as a citymaster I can give it 40/40/40 armor (which has the advantage of actually being twice as much armor and know that there is still plenty of stuff out there able to kill it.

So if I want values for a large number of weapons and vehicles, i could use the data tables from WSPMBT and get something that fits into the system right away.