Breaching vs. Cutting, Arsenal Explosives question Options

[kigmatzomat]

While I've read the Arsenal explosive rules I haven't studied them, if you catch my drift.

If you can get your explosives in the wall, your explosives are significantly more efficient because something like 99% of the energy gets applied to the structure. Trouble is, you can't "cut" with explosives in drilled holes. You can perforate with sequential holes, but each one is a stand-alone breech, so the rules don't quite mesh.

Underwater, the explosives again become much more efficient as the water channels the blast, essentially "auto tamping." For small holes, that seems kosher. But then, the rules may have a loop hole.

Lastly, from memory, if you've tamped your charges they're coming pretty close to a shaped charge, and cutting charges are just a subset of shaped charge. This might be kosher but I'll need to re-read that chapter of Arsenal.

All in all it becomes a question of simplicity with limited choices vs. complexity and more choices. We'd RPing the successes on demo tests as tamping, shaped charges, cutting charges, etc. Simple fast, we could live with it. Once you mechanically add more options, simplicity becomes harder.

You've got multiple mechanics for changing the explosives needed.
1) explosive rating (add/remove rating based on cutting vs. breaching vs. tamping)
2) DV multiplier (use a different DV for cutting vs tamping vs. breaching)
3) size of hole/cut (my suggestion of using successes to reduce breach size)
4) exponent of mass (e.g. cutting charges use cube root (x^1/3) and breaching charges use square root)

There's too many handles for everyone to be happy. Choose the one that you like best but realize that without some magical bit of genius, the majority is unlikely to agree.