*shrug* Smart armor gets used up, the faster you use it.

Yeah, I'm beginning to feel that too. You'd need to have some sort of conversion formula to compare cyberlimb and drone mod (and cybereye/ear) capacity.

Cyberlimb-drones would let you make an "empty shell" that has far, far more armor than a drone was ever meant to have. And then there's the potential of Body-increasing limb mods. Hmm.

Which makes it significantly less useful than regular armor.

10 SM -> 13 this attack -> 7 SM
7 SM -> 9 this attack -> 5 SM
5 SM -> 7 this attack -> 3 SM

Already by the second attack it's worth less than 10 regular armor. By the third, it's prevented less damage total.

In 3e it only reduced its effectiveness by 1 every time it activated, regardless of how well it deflected the attack.

Technically, that's what the Otomo is SUPPOSED to be, but it's not.

Really, all the humanoid Cyborg chassis should have been their own category instead of being lumped in with Drones. Treated as having all six cyberparts, limited vehicle mods allowed as some vehicle mods just make no sense for what amounts to an android body, etc.


-karma

It makes perfect sense if you consider AP as a absolut value, then redusing means it gets closer to 0 and adding means it goes furhet away from zero.
As it counters AP, i see it as only bringing your ap up to 0, ie. if the gun has AP-3 and the vehicle has rating 10 smart armor it only changes that to AP 0 not +7

Which is, once again, less awesome than having 10 armor.

10 smart armor is on top of any normal armor you have not instead of.

You're probably right, but I'll have to look at the rules again when I get home.

I'll attempt another understanding of the rules taking into consideration the previous few posts.

Smart armor is weird
it works by exploding micro charges a foot or so away from the body of the vehicle, destroying the incoming round.
It's just weird.

It works though. Today, in the real world.

What's weird is that the rules done line up to make any sense. It's not like you have to blow a third of it up in order to deflect one shot really really well. You just need to blow the right one up at the right time (after all, no one is making you expend more bullets based on your number of hits on your firearms test).

And on top of that, there's no example of how it works, especially for the edge cases (eg. absolute(AP) less than the value of the smart armor).

Yeah, it should certainly decrease, but you're right the SR3's version was more workable in that respect.

1 Turbocharger and you're at normal metahuman speed.


When a "crippling flaw" says that it is for the Renraku Manservant-III because of Renraku's arcology incedent, I don't think MCT cares much about it.

Yes, except that's not how the vehicle rules work.

No. Every drone is a vehicle, but not all vehicles are drones. Like whales and dolphins. A drone is a specialized vehicle that isn't intended to carry passengers who's chassis is designed to carry more armor than a comparable vehicle and that starts with a rigger adaptation.

Sure, but they all have Pilot, and it's trivial to control any vehicle as a minion of destruction. They're all drones. My point is that his AI character doesn't need to choose a "Drone" just to have a body.

AI with a borged out Vista?
or Citymaster

20 armor
a built in nexus
every sensor known to man
remote controlled turret weapons
sat link

take-off drone rack on the roof

They may all be drones by the term that a drone is an object to be used, but they are not all drones as defined by Shadowrun. You need to work on your clarification just a teeny bit.

It was clear from context, because we were discussing 'what can OP walk(/roll) around as'. I thought it was obvious that there are certain no-passenger (with exceptions) vehicles called Drones in SR, but we were looking at controllable vehicle 'drones'. No worries.

That combination would give you a locomotion system and two manipulators connected to an empty husk, because skull and torso are just empty shells. No power, no energy storage, not even sensors...

Alright, to disect Smart Armor once again.

For example we will be firing a 13 DV shot with AP -5 at a vehicle with 10 armor and 10 SM.



Alright, so first we have to assume that because armor is armor that "reducing the AP value" means to add.
So our weapon's AP value moves from -5 to +5 (AP can be positive). If the AP was already greater than 0 we wouldn't reduce it towards 0 (as that would be detrimental to the primary purpose of armor). Nor would be stop at 0, due to the later mechanics of SM. If AP starts at -1 and moves to 0 and the AP is reduced later (see below) by 3 to -3, our 10 smart armor actually made the weapon penetrate more, not less.



The smart armor's rating is its full value, not its current value. In this example, it is 10 and will be 10 for every shot (except in the case of glitches, see below).



This sentence, as written, makes no sense. Adding to the AP (say we roll 3 hits, our modified AP moves from +5 to +8 ) doesn't "make the smart armor less effective."
However subtracting the hits from the AP value (making the armor less effective) seems counter intuitive: shouldn't the armor be rolling to protect better?

However this is also the section that may be a holdover from the SR3 model where as smart armor lost uses the odds that it could deflect the next shot went down ("I'm sorry Dave, all the ablative sections on that side of the vehicle have been expended").

If we read the sentence substituting "ability to pierce armor" as a concept, for "AP value" then we read the sentence as "Every hit is added to the firing weapon’s ability to pierce armor (thus rendering the smart armor less effective)" making a completely logical sentence, indicating that we do indeed subtract the hits on the SM test from the modified AP value (+5 to +2). For 10 smart armor we still have a net gain of +7 effective armor, due to the change in AP value.

From here we apply the vehicle's regular armor (10) modified by AP (+2) for 12 against a DV of 13 (passes the physical/stun check). 12 dice gives us 4 hits, the vehicle takes 9 boxes of damage. Without our smart armor we'd have been rolling only 5 dice!



Here I assume they mean the rating being permanently reduced by 1, so if you glitch on 10 dice, next shot you only have 9.



You get 10 uses for 10 smart armor. No more. We can assume a glitch works like essence and magic, if you glitch on the third shot, you have 6(9) smart armor: 6 uses remaining (2 successful expenditures, 1 glitched* expenditure, and 1 loss from having a glitch), 9 rating.



I would also assume this doesn't let you recover lost rating points, those would need to be purchased and upgraded normally.

*A glitch is still successful. There are no rules here for critical glitches, which is odd given the rules: each hit reduces the effectiveness of the armor, so a critical glitch is actually more beneficial to the vehicle than a regular glitch!