Re: [HOE] Miscellaneous armor question [SHANE]

[Robert Holland <robert@macauley.com>]

>To me it seems like the rule that even one level of AP on an attack negates any amount of soft armor is the source of alot of special cases (like magical soft armor) and situations that just don't make sense (a thick wall of leather with an AV of -50, no problem got my 2D4 - AP 1 Derringer here, the wall doesn't even slow the bullet while a 6D12 cannon round (with no AP) would likely be stopped completely.

How often are you likely to run into a foot-thick wall of solid leather? In the
extremely unlikely case that this happened, instead of trying to fudge it with
the personal armor rules, I'd look at the armor level chart (HOE97) and assign
it, say, AV 3 (4-6" of solid wood, thin metal).

>What about treating say 4 or 5 levels of soft armor as 1 level of hard armor for purposes of AP vs. AV where the soft levels are always the last to be negated? If the soft armor is of level 3 or less it is simply ignored (as soft AV is today). It would make situations like one above simpler to resolve and there would be less special cases (a 25 point syker Forcefield is 21 when hit by an AP - 1 bullet but only 5 points when hit by a AP - 5 round). The usual answer to this is of course "Go ahead, use it.", I will, I would just like to discuss it first.

I don't think there's any light armor in the game that exceeds -6. The idea of
light armor is that it's better than nothing but not as good as AV 1--beyond -6,
you should ditch light armor and go to normal armor. The only exception to this
is the Force Field syker power, and I'll quote from Theo McGuckin's post the
last time this came up:

>Shane put out an email (is it in a FAQ?) stating that Forcefield "negates
>5 points of damage per success/raise" instead of "gives light armor -5 per
>success/raise". What this means is that Forcefield is NOT affected by AP
>ammo (you still get the damage reduction, and I think you are still
>treated as unarmored for the -1 die of damage from AP ammo).
>
>I'm not sure about Armor of the Saints, but I would say that any power
>that creates supernatural armor is NOT ignored by AP ammo. Apply the rule
>evenly, right?

So technically Force Field shouldn't even be considered "light armor", it just
happens to have a similar game mechanic.

As to why AP ammo doesn't affect magical armor, try this explanation: an
armor-piercing round is designed to poke a deep, small-diameter hole through a
narrowly defined set of objects, that is, physical armor composites. However the
round does this (dense penetrator with discarding sabot, shaped-charge warhead,
etc.), its function is based on the assumption that physical matter will react
in a certain way. A magical force field doesn't react at all the same way. It
may produce a uniform outward pressure, it may "soften" any blows that connect
with the skin, whatever; the point is it is very different from the armor that
AP rounds are designed to defeat, even if game-mechanically it is similar.
Trying to penetrate a force field with a DPU round is like trying to nail a
heavy picture frame to a pillow; that's just not what it's designed for.

Hope this helps.

--Robert Holland