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Austere Emancipator
QUOTE
Herald of Verjigorm wrote:
From the ambushing vehicles thread, I saw a comment almost degrade into hatred of the SR3 rules about explosives. It made me think of an alternative to the area of effect currently listed.

Base degredation is -3/m, a demolitions test against (base damage (number side)+ the amount of change wanted) can be used to increase or decrease the effective dissipation. Thus a grenade is assumed to be altered for maximum area, and other explosives can be set up for different effects.

Easy to maximize a half-kilo of commercial, but hard to maximize 43 kilos of c12.

Would you use it? What constants should be altered to make it better?

-3/m is a good baseline. The TN for decreasing dissipation is a bit harsh: it makes "grenadifying" a kilo of C-12 nearly impossible. Maybe use something like TN (2 + Power/10) to make the degradation -2/m (this should be easy, like just dropping misc hard junk on the explosive) or TN (3 + Power/5) to make the degradation -1/m.

In fact I'll probably use something very similar, I just won't have the TN rise much with added explosives. I don't think the job would become that much harder, it will just take longer. Maybe use a TN of 4 - 6 for most cases, with a base time of, say, 6 hours for a small explosive (~0.5kg or less) and up to 10 days for larger ones for getting the Blast to -1/m.

The resulting explosive device should be quite a lot bigger than the original, perhaps double @ -2/m and 4x @ -1/m.

Making the Power degrade faster should only be allowed if the explosive is directed (like when trying to penetrate a wall), in which case I'll probably just increase the degradation to ~-5/m without much fuss (TN 4, 10 minutes base time, doubled weight).
Herald of Verjigorm
I wondered if this idea would be lost.

About the TN, I didn't spend much time looking at the probability of results, your numbers are better. I think there should be a simlpe constant formula that covers the intent at least as well, but I haven't found it yet. Maybe a professional demolitionist can give some advice.
Austere Emancipator
I hardly ever let good ideas related to firearms/ranged combat/armor/warfare/explosions get lost...

No such luck with professional demolitionists, though. It seems to be a very rare occurrence that people who have extensive knowledge of RL explosives end up replying to these kinds of threads.

A simple constant formula would certainly be nice, I just generally make up the numbers for most stuff as I go along so they aren't as important to me. It would be great, however, if the TN would not rise quite as fast as it does when using any multiple of the Power of the explosive directly in there. On the other hand, it would suck to have to use yet ANOTHER square root, when the Power is already a square root function.
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