Melee weapons against vehicles or drones?

Melee weapons against vehicles or drones?

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blakkie

Oct 8 2004, 03:23 AM

Post #51

Dragon

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QUOTE (Necro Tech @ Oct 8 2004, 02:56 AM)

Oddly, by cannon, melee weapons aren't mentioned in regards to harming vehicles. The section dealing with damaging attacks against vehicles starts with the sentence "If a character is shooting at a vehicle......". No where does it ever mention melee attacks. Grenades, spells, explosions and gun fire are mentioned but no melee. Hmmmmmm. Weird oversite or were they just thinking that melee weapons use the rules for barriers (like all weapons against vehicle armor) like in 2nd edition.

Hard to believe no one ever mentioned this. Or am I just not seeing it?

What kind of idiot attacks a tank/APC/etc. with a freakin' stick, pointy as it may be? Well obviously the authors of SR underestimated the idiocy of their customers. Although who could hold that against them. Let he who has never been surprised by a new depth of idiocy of a SR player cast the first stone. :cyber:

Shanshu Freeman

Oct 8 2004, 04:52 AM

Post #52

Moving Target

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QUOTE (Canid13)

As for the Katana, it's base damage. I might allow two handed use to increase the power, but for a non-troll I believe that to be a +1 increase in power and not a +2 so it may not work depending on whether it specifies rounding down or not.

I read that mentioned elsewhere... where does that rule come from?

mfb View Member Profile	Oct 8 2004, 05:50 AM Post #53
Immortal Elf Group: Members Posts: 11,410 Joined: 1-October 03 From: Pittsburgh Member No.: 5,670	the +1 power for using a one-handed weapon with two hands is in CC. trolls don't get anything special out of this; it's +1 for everybody.

Adarael

Oct 8 2004, 07:48 AM

Post #54

Deus Absconditus

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QUOTE

There is no halving of BOD in SR for unconscious characters, the bodies of magicians who are astrally projecting, etc. I think there's one particular type of immobility which causes a +3 on Damage Resistance tests, but there's no such rule for anything else.

Hell, I generally wouldn't even allow them to roll at all. But I tend to be mean about that.

QUOTE

And to make it absolutely clear, the secguard in my example is completely capable of moving or rolling with the hit, just like the rigger-controlled drone in question.

Ahh, and here we misunderstand eachother. When I say 'something between two objects', I should have said 'something between two objects that is attached to one of them.' The drone is capable of moving, sure - that's the control pool dodge test. But its' sides, its' front, its' general areas which may be struck can't - well, unless they have smart materials, but that's really splitting hairs.

It's like this. Take your sec guard. By the rules, there's no way my troll street sam with a dikoted pike could thrust the pike through him and into the pillow behind him, because there's no rules provision to deal with firing (or thrusting) through barriers that don't have a barrier rating. Common sense would indicate that a human should be subject to 'firing through' rules just like any other object, should they sustain damage in excess of a certain level - which would naturally have to be dictated on a case-by-case basis. This is why I tend to use Raygun's overpenetration rules.

By the same token, you cannot, under any canon circumstance, thrust through any part of a vehicle and then reach inside that hole to grab someone's keys, unless one applies barrier rating rules.

QUOTE

Still, none of my concern. Melee weapons don't penetrate inches of hardened steel in my game, and never will. If you want to allow them to in yours, go ahead.

Nor will it in mine. But I also don't regard armor 6 as being 'inches of hardened steel', primarily because 'inches of hardened steel' is reserved for IFVs, APCs, tanks and the like, with between 12-20 points of armor. And also because I have a really hard time imagining ANY kind of fuel-cell operated drone the size of a trash can trucking around with that much steel, no matter how fast its' rotors might move.

Austere Emancipa...

Oct 8 2004, 07:52 AM

Post #55

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QUOTE (Kremlin KOA)

Austere, you mean like that incident in WW2 france where a french lancer charged a german tank and had his lance penetrate the front armor killing the pilot? (the gunner mowed the bastard down with the pintle mount right after but the lance still stuck out of the tank) and that wasn't dikote sharpness. force applied is momentum/surface area and a dikote edge has a far smaller surface area than a bullet. maybe enough to more than make up for the difference in momentum (momentum of course being velocity*mass)

Linky? Did the lance by any chance go through the peeping hole for the driver? (A 10" x 4" hole, at best.) Which particular model of tank was this? You can see the front of a Panzer III quite clearly here, the driver's "window" being visible on the right side of the flat portion of the front hull.

Since, I assume, happened furing the primary French campaign, we're probably talking about a Pz I, Pz II or Pz35/38. The lightest of these, the Pz I had 13mm of armor steel on the front of the hull. Now I'm not saying it's impossible to penetrate that with a lance, since I'm not completely certain how well the lancer can exert force on the lance from the horse through himself.

If he can increase the effective weight of the lance to 120kg (ie keep himself completely rigid and nailed to the saddle at the moment of impact), assuming the lance has a 1cm diameter steel point and it's moving at 15m/s at the steel plate, he can exert the same amount of energy/area as an armor piercing rifle round potentially capable of penetrating that armor.

The more likely situation is that he can increase the effective mass to about 30kg and breaks a number of bones.

Austere Emancipa... Austere Emancipator View Member Profile	Oct 8 2004, 08:08 AM Post #56
Great Dragon Group: Members Posts: 5,889 Joined: 3-August 03 From: A CPI rank 1 country Member No.: 5,222	Adarael: I was going to post a very long-winded explanation of why I don't like that logic, but it boils down to us very much disagreeing. I'd like to point out I describe overpenetration whenever it makes sense -- whenever non-expanding/fragmenting bullets hit unarmored humans, for example -- but that has very little to do with how much damage is caused to the character in question, and absolutely nothing to do with how easy it is to penetrate the armor he's wearing.

Adarael

Oct 8 2004, 10:07 AM

Post #57

Deus Absconditus

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QUOTE

but that has very little to do with how much damage is caused to the character in question, and absolutely nothing to do with how easy it is to penetrate the armor he's wearing.

True. But damage is about the only measure *I* have, as a GM, of how much of a speed-to-tissue-disruption ratio a given wound has.

Edit: As in, if there is little to no tissue disruption from a reasonably sized object, such as anything used as a weapon, there is little to no chance of overpenetration. Because the object can reasonably be assumed to have been stopped within a given body.

Ergo, use of Raygun's power code over body/armor thing to produce overpenetration.

What my argument boils down to is this - if a hand-held weapon with a super-sharp edge does not have some off-the-cuff rules proviso to allow it to penetrate a *moderate* amount of armor, in the hands of a being twice as strong as the strongest unaugmented (or un-superfantastic) human being, I wonder about the physics of lances, estocs, picks, et cetera punching through some of the heavier armors of earlier eras.

If a 12S melee attack standing no chance of penetrating an armor 6 vehicle (less than half that of a 'lightly armored' military vehicle, and half that of the most 'lightly armored' IFV), yet the same weapon could by the rules penetrate the same substance (assume barrier rating 12) if it were NOT attached to a vehicle seems a bit unusual.

Shockwave_IIc View Member Profile	Oct 8 2004, 10:29 AM Post #58
Shooting Target Group: Members Posts: 1,512 Joined: 16-August 03 From: Northampton Member No.: 5,499	For the person who asked. A Str9 Character with Dikoted Katana hits with a power of 13 +1 if used in 2 hands. But i think thats been answered. Pulling knockdown on drones, most ammusing. You would of thought drone designers would of learned something from Robotwars, SRMechs!!!

Austere Emancipa...

Oct 8 2004, 10:31 AM

Post #59

Great Dragon

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Damage only tells you how much, and what kind of, tissue is disrupted. It doesn't tell you anything about how fast a bullet is moving, what kind of bullet it is, etc. Well, the (f) denotation in some Damage Codes might, but that's about all. With no rules present, only fluff text, and real-world comparisons (if you wish to make them) can give you an idea of what kinds of projectiles would reasonably penetrate how much flesh, or even body armor.

[Edit]Reasonably, a Light Pistol firing FMJ ammunition would always penetrate an unarmored human torso with ease -- witness the 70cm deep hole made by a 9mm FMJ in gelatin. That's 6L in terms of Damage Code. A Heavy Pistol firing Glazer ammunition would be very, very unlikely to manage that, even with its DC of 11S (check this for an idea).

QUOTE (Adarael)

I wonder about the physics of lances, estocs, picks, et cetera punching through some of the heavier armors of earlier eras.

The thickest plate armor I know of is 1.3 millimeters thick (the maximum for 16 Gauge plate), 1/20th of an inch, and the material is significantly worse than armor steel. The lightest modern armored vehicles you will find have around ½" thick steel hulls, or twice that in aluminum -- this is protection against shrapnel and non-armor piercing small arms fire. ½" of armor steel is not enough to provide reliable protection against HMG FMJs, which is only Armor 5 in SR terms, Armor 7 if you go by the Sniper Rifles.

For another kind of comparison, a full plate mail doesn't significantly slow down even expanding bullets from some low-power pistols. This is Ballistic Armor 1 territory. Vehicle Armor 6 is the equivalent of 12 points of Ballistic Armor, plus hardened metal armor is not vulnerable to sharp edges like soft body armor is.

QUOTE (Adarael)

If a 12S melee attack standing no chance of penetrating an armor 6 vehicle [...], yet the same weapon could by the rules penetrate the same substance (assume barrier rating 12) if it were NOT attached to a vehicle seems a bit unusual.

There is no rule on how Armor ratings relate to Barrier ratings. Armored Material has a Barrier rating of 24. A standard, armored door would have a BR of 24, a security armored door would have a BR of 48. Those are the kinds of objects I'd relate to the thick metal plates on armored vehicles.

I admit that the extremely high Armor ratings on many small drones seem very silly, as does the whole concept of a small rotodrone with heavy armor. I rather correct that making heavy armor more limiting on vehicles (greater weight, more handling penalties, stricter weight limits for small flying things) than by saying that vehicle armor isn't very hard.[/Edit]

This post has been edited by Austere Emancipator: Oct 8 2004, 11:07 AM

DrJest

Oct 8 2004, 10:35 AM

Post #60

Running Target

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QUOTE

Adarael, it was 2nd ed that dikote made edged things AV (in 2nd ed you removed the dikote modifier and treated the vehicle as a non vehicular target for damage purposes... dikote shuriken in trollish hands rocked back then)

Okay, another old-timer question - I take it from what you're saying that Dikote has completely changed since then? Damn! I still have fond memories of a physad shooting down those little whatchamacallits, the vector thrust drones, with dikoted arrows out of his Ranger-X...

Shockwave_IIc View Member Profile	Oct 8 2004, 10:39 AM Post #61
Shooting Target Group: Members Posts: 1,512 Joined: 16-August 03 From: Northampton Member No.: 5,499	As long as you have strength around the 12 mark you'll be fine.

DarkShade View Member Profile	Oct 8 2004, 01:10 PM Post #62
Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 138 Joined: 24-September 04 Member No.: 6,700	wow this has become a big discussion :) it seems everyone is split 50-50 on whether the adept could damage the drone.. but most everyone agrees some type of damage coudl be inflicted with a called shot.. the second question,however, is just as important as I assume every rigger tries it from time to time.. it is easy for the rigger to ram another vehicle, but how easy is it for a pedestrian to dodge out of its way? in the precise example, the riggers car was standing more or less still, while the `target` walked not too far from it trying to get a suitcase, the rigger decided to try an acceleration and crash into the victim. AFAIK the rules do not cover this which seems a bit odd as it is not such a rare thing... DS

Austere Emancipa...

Oct 8 2004, 01:45 PM

Post #63

Great Dragon

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QUOTE (Kremlin KOA)

in Canon rules that adept's katana is 13S one handed and 14S two handed, and 14/2 = 7

Maybe. BBB says the katana is a "two-handed samurai sword", and if you take that to mean it's a two-handed weapon (which is, I think you'll agree, a rather easy step of logic to take), it won't get +1 Power for being wielded in two hands. Which drops it back to 13S, which will be rounded down to 6 when attacking vehicles. (I was waiting for someone else to address this at first, since someone usually does...)

Tarantula

Oct 8 2004, 02:08 PM

Post #64

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QUOTE (DarkShade)

wow this has become a big discussion :)
it seems everyone is split 50-50 on whether the adept could damage the drone..
but most everyone agrees some type of damage coudl be inflicted with a called shot..

the second question,however, is just as important as I assume every rigger tries it from time to time.. it is easy for the rigger to ram another vehicle, but how easy is it for a pedestrian to dodge out of its way?
in the precise example, the riggers car was standing more or less still, while the `target` walked not too far from it trying to get a suitcase, the rigger decided to try an acceleration and crash into the victim.
AFAIK the rules do not cover this which seems a bit odd as it is not such a rare thing...

DS

Ramming rules cover that, the pedestrian rolls their quickness (or is it reaction?) to dodge against the drones pilot or the riggers skill in the drone. If the ped gets more success he dodges, otherwise, he is rammed. This all only happens if the drone is able to accelerate enough to hit the distance between it and the pedestrian.

Botch

Oct 8 2004, 02:29 PM

Post #65

Moving Target

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QUOTE (Lindt)

Your telling me you can walk up to a Wells Fargo truck and do any sort of damage that will inhibit its operation with anything short of a .357? There is a reason that melee weapons where replaced by firearms.

Put a potato in the exhaust pipe? :please:

Kagetenshi View Member Profile	Oct 8 2004, 02:31 PM Post #66
Manus Celer Dei Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 17,013 Joined: 30-December 02 From: Boston Member No.: 3,802	Now, I'm not positive, but I have enough faith in the intelligence of the people who design such things to think that maybe, just maybe, they might have thought of that. ~J

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