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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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]

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...

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...)

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.

Put a potato in the exhaust pipe?