How do you handle armor on drones? Do you treat it as vehicle armor, or normal armor?

*** If this has been asked before, if someone would be so kind as to send me the link, I would apprecaite it.

Depends. There are two types of armor in the Customization section.

I believe, unless it says otherwise, it's vehicle.

Vehicle, 'cause that's what it is. Personal armor is listed separately.

~J

I wondered. I tried with just normal armor and the players were going to crunch those like popcorn.

Thankx... We were thinking vehicle.

oh its most definetly vehicle. alltho unless you pile on that armor you still risk seeing some of them go pop every time someone looks at them funny...

The peculiar thing is that you can usually cram a lot more armor on a smaller drone than you can a larger one due to the math they use for the armor's weight.

Take these as an example, and keep in mind that I'm just going with maxed barebone chassis and EFC power plants here: A Small Tracked Crawler (Body 1) can handle up to 70(!!!) points of Vehicle Armor whereas a Medium Tracked Crawler (Body 2) can handle only 35 points worth. Sure, both are going to drive the Handling to unmanagable extremes, but the point stands nonethless.

I always found that kind of odd.

Bah, handling is only important if you want it to move.

the armor rules are more than a bit dodgy... I find myself having to houserule it by taking a look at what can be done in RL now every time the rigger picks up rigger3 and starts twinking out his drones.. I dont remember it being so complex in sr2.. riggers, given enough $$$ can be more complex than deckers..

DS

Riggers are easily more complex than deckers when you create one (or modify the vehicles). But when running as simple combat they are simpler (just) and they cant perform MIJI when fighting (unless they have the drones control themselves).

True they can get obscenely complicated.

Edward

personal armor is also a really nice thing to slap onto vehicles and drones. sure, it's only half as effective against anti-vehicular armor, but it also doesn't slow your vehicle at all, and it's not detectable.

I just rule that the max armor a drone can have is body x4 or body x3.

Not that more than that is usually needed

~J

Oddly enough (or perhaps not so oddly), you need a good Handling *to* crash into something. Well, unless you're clever and, after seeing your Handling score of 20, announce "Okay, I'm going to try to navigate RIGHT past that car over there... and in no way whatsoever do I want to hit it. That would be bad."

"Hmm... it's dark, I've got Serious Stun and Serious Physical and Low Pain Tolerance and got pepper-sprayed and I've got a bright flashlight in my eyes that isn't reflecting back into the darkness and it's hailing and there's heavy smoke and the opponent is invisible and moving 200 meters per turn…

I aim at everything but them!"

~J