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Old 06-02-2011, 09:01 AM   #8
Kromm
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Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: Montréal, Québec
Default Re: Vehicles and Linked Damage

Shaped-charge weapons normally have linked damage, not follow-up damage. It's a special case, however: Use the primary attack (the one with the divisor) against the target. Assess the secondary attack against everything else in the area.

This is a complexification of the Damage rules on pp. B268-269. On p. B281, shaped-charge weapons simply inflict nm(10) cr ex, and you're instructed to drop the (10) against everything but the target. Thus, the LAW, 84mm listed there does 6d×6(10) cr ex to the target and 6d×6 cr ex to those nearby.

Real-life shaped-charge weapons ideally expend more energy in the forward cone, though, which makes the Basic Set treatment overly simple. The same LAW on p. 148 of High-Tech (the FFV AT4) does 6d×6(10) cr ex to the target but only 7d×2 cr ex to those nearby. This added wrinkle allows us to model the differences between HEAT and HEDP more accurately (better armor-piercing vs. bigger incidental explosion), and to show how HEAT warheads have improved over time (an incidental blast larger than the armor-piercing one is often a design goal for HEDP, but for HEAT, it's a sign of an earlier, less-efficient model).

The one exception to all this is multi-stage HEAT. This uses the extra-complicated rules on p. 170 of High-Tech.
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