Hello All,

I'm looking for suggestions on houserule 4th edition stats for a Main Battle Tank, specifically the CAS Stonewall. In the absence of vehicle design rules, I, teh humble nooblet, have no bloody clue how to go about describing this thing in game terms. Plot requires one though, so any ideas would be welcome.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts,

-Ferret

Does it need stats? Do you really need to resolve combat normally with one? Or is it just a plot device?

Players always appreciate you rolling dice before you arbitrarily tell them that they're dead.

Unfortunately I don't have the 3rd edition rigger book, so don't have point of comparison. I'd suggest that you look at both its stats in 3rd, along with the stats for vehicles that exist in both editions, such as the Citymaster, and then calculate accordingly. Make sure it has a high rating Pilot program and some good solid IC. That way, it can go beserk like a good automated weapon is supposed to.

-K.

Make sure it got tons of armor Nothing you should be able to take down with and Aztech striker.

Without spending Edge on a Long Shot roll...

"GM, I bypass 10 billion points of armor with my Ares and I'll spend Edge for a Long Shot roll."

But seriously, if you cant do handwaving when tanks are involved they may not be appropriate.

hmm, i think it was sota:63 that had stats for tanks. but one could build one using rigger3, after they errata-ed the requirements for the largest turret so that you could mount it on top of a caterpillars chassis.

but to be able to carry the turret, gun and armor, the engine had to be modified to hell, maxing out the engine customization rules. so in the end you where left with a engine that could break down at any given moment.

but from what i understand, modern tanks also stress their engines to the max when in operation...

...yes it was, in the Soldiers of Fortune chapter.

I do not recall seeing the Stonewall in RIII. According to RII it was a thunderbird for which the stats were purposely made unavailable (written as a corrupted download).

The heaviest tank armaments/armour wise is the Rhur Leopard III with an AF of 40 and an extra large turret with a heavy railgun, rocket launchers, and a micro turret as well with an HVAR or combat laser. It also has radar absorbent material and thermal baffling to improve its signature and most likely would have military grade EW systems. A couple of these would be quite a handful for a team of runners even if they had shoulder launched ATGMs

Of course this are SRIII based & I'm not sure which way this would translate to SR4.

Well, firstly, thanks for all your responses. The target of the run is a milspec research facility that is going to contain a metric crapload of mechanized infantry packed into heavily upgraded Citymasters. I thought a Main Battle Tank crashing through a quonset hut right before the team meet their ride home would be a sufficiently theatrical way to let the runner-monkeys know I care. The Ruhr Leopard would be just fine. I can figure out most of the EW package, but what sort of Armor and Body should a beastie of this stripe carry?

I expect 3 AV missiles inbound per turn from the cyberadept's Yakosoku, 2 mages and whatever nastiness they conjure up, the muscle and drones that survived the first three quarters of the run, and a tag-team effort by the department of hacking and technomancy to subvert the tank's electronics via the facility's tactical network. In response, would it be out of line to have an EW specialist/hacker as a crew member aboard one of these tanks? Milspec EW loadouts just scream for a cybered up E-6 or Warrant Officer with Encephalon 3 and all the other happy hard to find headware.

Regarding weapons, the main gun would likely track too slowly to be much use against individual dismounts, especially ones with 2+ passes per turn, so the secondary weapon systems are actually of more interest to me. The Micro-turret obviously gets an Ultimax lobbing Ex-Ex, but the missile launchers elude me. How many tubes? Also, are they mounted coaxially with the main gun, or in box launchers, or what? Details, I need details! Pretty please?

I understand that. However, they are a lot more likely to be able to take actions to get out of line of sight or go full defense while still returning fire.

GMC Banshee (Thunderbird) with Handling, Speed, and Acceleration stats of an Ares Citymaster + Mitsubishi Yakusoku MRL with Anti-Vehicile Missles simulating the "big gun" = pretty decent tank stats.

Tanks typically don't have a bunch of extra weapons to take out infantry. A typical tank has a MMG mounted co-ax with the main gun, an exterior MMG or HMG for the commander. And sometimes either a bow mounted MMG or another exterior MMG.

Since the main gun can almost certainly engage helicopters, it probably won't have too much trouble shooting at people, though why the tank would bother, I don't know. Assuming that the main gun is a low caliber weapon firing very fast KE penetrators then it's utility against personnel is pretty limited. Sure it'll kill one guy when you shoot him with it, but what's the point of shooting a single guy?

Assuming you want to keep it as a flying tank, try out the following stats:

Body 36
armor vs KE 250/125/60 (front/sides/rear)
Armor vs HEAT 500/200/100 (front/sides/rear)

Main gun: 60 (-540) (within 1000 meters, anyway)
Co-ax MMG
(can't have exterior crew operated weapons since the tank goes too fast)

Depending on how complicated you want to get, you can add active anti-missile defenses. But, of course, any missiles anyone would shoot at it would be evolved to deal with those.

In general, if teh ATGM hits the tank, the tank is toast. That's the whole point of ATGMs.

Assuming you are using 'light' ATGMs then they'll do something like 50(-450) HEAT up to around 90(-810) HEAT damage, depending on who made them, since they are designed to take out much heavier armor of non-flying tanks, the flying tank is just toast.

Using the same scales, the ground based tank might look like:
armor vs KE 600/300/100 (front/sides/rear)
Armor vs HEAT 1000/500/180 (front/sides/rear)
Main gun: 65 (-585) (within 1000 meters, anyway)

Of course, almost every ATGM will attack the top armor of the ground based tank, so use the value of the side armor when hit by ATGMs...

@ Funkenstein: I was thinking more along the lines of a pair of Yakosokus, plus a main gun, plus the microturret in Kid Kyoto's description. Also, I need at least 25 armor to keep up with the wall o' AV missiles and spirits the PCs are gonna rain on me. I want this baby to last at least 5 turns against up to 7 high level runners plus drones. Good call on the handling stats, though.

@Bob: Dude, j00 !05t m3. Are those meant to be SR4 damage codes? I am confused.

Three observations: While a MBT main gun can indeed shoot at a helicopter, it can do this because the helicopter is typically some distance away. At extremely short ranges (such as are likel to be encountered here) there will be

Tanks have had grenade launchers fitted before, and it is quite possible that it might happen again. Infact as remote control systems are quite awesome in SR4, it will probably have one along with a pintel mounted HMG and a co-axial HMG.

Lastly, Tanks need to have front/side/rear armour - and the side armour needs to be killable by a 16P/-6 (The ATGM's listed in the book on page 314) to preserve a modern feel.

I'd suggest different body ratings for the various potential angles of impact (front/rear/side/top) and make top the weakest (by alot) and the front virtually impenetrable.

I can see multiple armor ratings, especially as this will give teh runners a reason to think all tactical-like and make with the flanking, before they get hamburgered.

Spirits: Not much can be done against them unless the opposition is using magic to protect their assets. A single enemy spirit with Guard and Magical Guard should go a long way to defending the tank until the runners take said spirit(s) out.

Missiles: The GMC Thunderbird has 20 Body and 18 Armor. Assuming the tank pilot is exceptionally skilled and has a few autosofts augmenting his abilities (especially Defense), he should be able to handle at least the first few missiles with only a minor crippling at worst. Even assuming the runners score a critical success on each hit (5 net hits), the tank is resisting 11S with 32 dice (8 hits if purchased), resulting in only three boxes of damage. And that's assuming the hits were purchased, whereas odds are it would resist it completely most of the time (~11 hits). That is, again, assuming a critical success on the opposed attack roll. No Edge thrown into the mix either.

Modern tanks have only 2-3 secondary weapons, because they're manned manually by people. Tanks in 2070 should have something more like 3-6 secondary weapons, including several MGs, possibly a laser cannon, and some sort of APS (possibly the laser) to defend against missiles. They should also be sensored out; I believe an earlier book made a reference to tanks having some sort of "protective zone", within which any crunchies were basically dead the instant they were detected and categorized as a threat.

The big numbers above look suspiciously like armor equivalents in mm of RHA ("baseline" armor used for comparison).

If you want to keep the players tied up for a while, I'd suggest a few other things then

Armoured skirts: Will defeat the first ATGM hit on the side but is ruined automatically after that.

Electrically charged spaced armor: Automatically defeats the first ATGM hit on an armor panel. Works by discharging a huge voltage through the penetrating stream of metal in an ATGM to vaporise it. These are currently in experimental tests, will be established by 2070 I imagine!


Guns: Remote control is very possible in an SR4 tank due to rigging. Thus it is quite likely that the tank will feature

2 Pintel mounted HMGs - one could be a mini turret as suggested by KK.
1 Pintel mounted automatic grenade launchers
Fixed grenade, smoke, and thermal smoke launchers mounted on the tank (Treat as some sort of fixed pattern launcher than covers 45 or 90 degree quadrants around the tank with 3 equally spaced grenades at a a 10 meter range from the tank. SOP will be to launch smoke and CS gas as soon as engagement begins - this is a free action, then use the others as required. All weapons will have thermo graphic vision)
1 co-axially mounted HMG
Main gun will be loaded with AP initially, which will be useless, but will switch to HE rounds afterwards. You can probably assume an effect equivalent to several kilos of plastic explosive due to a HE blast.

For reference a modern tank shell is like 20 kilos. You can probably expect this thing to be the equivalent of 5 kilos of rating 10? plastic explosive.

ATGM missiles of it's own attached to the same mounts as the HMGs - this will preclude it from firing both at the same time. Expect 2 missles per mount. use ATGM missiles from book.

One of the main controlling factors of weapon systems will be the cost of maintaining them. So if thats too hardcore, take out the ATGMs and the pintel mounted Gren launcher first, and give the HMGs tracer + Ex-EX rounds.

Additionally the system will have a Sat uplink providing comms, 2 rating 10 directional jammers, and a rating 6 area jammer. There will also be 4-6 agents running on 6/6/6/6 systems that will be split between running defense on the tanks systems and running offensive on the aggressors systems.

How is it broken? The system can be quickly matched against RL data if you need stats for something not in the book. It uses the same scale as samll arms damage and the same basic rules.

But then you discover that wallhacker or the troll bow can do more damage than an ATGM. Or that your adept can puch just as hard. Does this mean that my adept can punch through over 2 inches of armor steel?

Doing a quick re-write of the rules lets you add stats for most armored vehicles and anti-armor weapons via google.

If I want the runners to face time traveling Nazis in a tiger, I can give the tiger the following rough stats (from a quick google)

Body 40?
armor 120/80/80
main gun 30(-140) (firing APCR)

And I can know right away how whether the tiger's gun can penetrate a modern tank, or APC, or whatever.

[edit]
The problem with compressing numbers at the high end like that is that most of the low end numbers (bullet damage, troll bows, punching) all scale linearly. But the heavy armor dosen't scale at all. Theres a huge difference between an APC with body 12 and armor 24/24/24 and a MBT with body 60 and armor 600/300/100. But not much of a difference between and APC with armor 18 and a MBT with armor 24. In my system, it's possible for a troll bow to be useful against APCs, while still not killing tanks.
[/edit]

Yeah, it's self evidently a problem with just the strength attribute. I take your point. Still houserule territory which you should flag though!

Erm, since there are no canon stats for tanks in SR, any tank stats would be house rules! 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).

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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Exactly my point.

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.

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.

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

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

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.