RE: [HOE] Miscellaneous armor question [SHANE]

["Johnny Burlin" <Johnny.Burlin@home.se>]

> 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).

Yes, that solves the problem of a the leather wall, but I wanted to point out what happens
when even a single point of AP negates ANY amount of soft AV.

> 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:

Armor of the Saints + Boiled Leather Shirt + Queen of Clubs mutation, AV -11
(assuming of course that soft armor "stacks"). You can increase this some more with
Molecular Bonding (2 pts per success and raise) and against certain types of attacks
you can have an additional 5 pts (Rad Tolerant). AV -20 is far from unachieveable,
but a single AP-level and it's all gone.

Ok, the Forcefield text is updated (missed that one, sorry) so it no longer gives soft AV. 
That case is thus closed.

> 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.

Is magical armor really immune to AP attacks? That was just an assumption I made in a 
previous mail when I tried to find a reason as to why Forcefield wasn't negated by AP 
ammo. An interesting question then is when a piece armor is considered magical, 
the different arcane powers are clearly magical but what about junker built armor? Relics? 
Coup powers? And if magical armor is unaffected by AP-attacks, are they unaffected by
magical AP-attacks (mostly junker ammo with spirit wepon power)?

I don't think magical armor should be immune to mundane AP. When they give some
form of protection that can't be reduced they should give Damage Reduction instead
of AV (hard or soft).

And I still want to know how much damage the Templar with the Kevlar west and boiled
leather shirt (they are layered as Kevlar - Leather - AotS (Hard) - AotS (Soft))
would take from a 3D6-AP2 bullet and a 3D6-AP3 bullet. 
Does the order of the layers matter? Any suggestions?

/Johnny