Quote:
Originally Posted by safisher
I've said before that we I think the fundamental problem with GURPS armor designed for hand weapons, rather than on the vehicle scale, is that it's likely that comparatively thin armor still provides good protection at lower DR ranges against hand weapons. Take a typical glossy newstand magazine (Popular Science, etc.) and hold it up with one hand and stab it or slash it with a knife with the other. It ought to give say DR2-3. Versus a .22 it's no DR. Same thing with a typical leather jacket, where you'd be hard pressed to cut through it a knife. The difference between a light leather jacket and heavy one is 1 DR? As it is, the whole things a wash based on the two scales.
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I agree that GURPS model for muscle-powered weapons vs. armour and its model of bullets vs. armour are out of sync; one is based on SJ talking to his SCA buddies in the 1980s ("telling blow!"), and one is based on peope like Doug Cole using ballistics tests and back-of-the-envelope calculations. Damage, especially swung damage, increases faster than the lifting capacity of ST suggests.
But that gets us into how few stories portray blow-by-blow fights where armour works, and GURPS does not have mechanics to represent all the ways that being pounded on is not fun other than damage. So like some other areas of GURPS, it could do with a redesign from the ground up, but that would affect other parts of the system and require a team of experts to volunteer a silly number of hours. You and Dan and Doug and David Pulver sometimes do that but I am too busy.