Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
That's why I cut the area from 7+ square feet to 5. If we put the boundary at the belt, that 10x12 plate is covering an area that's about 14-15"x16-18", with at least 2" missing on all sides. Discounting the shoulders which are part of the arms, at the top that's the base of the throat and the collar (and the shoulders, but that counts as arms), at the sides it's mostly ribs, at the base it's the stomach and upper intestines (a general problem with GURPS hit locations, not that it's easy to fix in other game systems either, is that you can miss and hit something else).
An odd thing about this is that chance of protection applying is higher when hit probability is higher, because higher hit probability means tighter groups. 'Hit by exactly zero bypasses armor' does a decent job of modeling this but is counterintuitive. Maybe combined with something else where a hit by 0 is a grazing hit.
|
I feel that a significant number of misses in combat are going to be for psychological reasons or because the shooter lacks situational awareness. As such, I think a higher number of misses will be way off target than will miss relatively narrowly, i.e. be 6-8 inches to the side.
Obviously, I want to reflect the chance for such near 'misses' of center mass, i.e. in GURPS terms, a torso hit that hits areas not protected by ballistic panels or plates. But I don't have a problem with them occuring more rarely than purely proportional surface coverage would indicate. Basically, I think that a fairly high number of hits will hit within a few inches of the center mass aimed for and the majority of misses will actually miss badly, because they are not so much small technical errors as they are shots fired at entirely the wrong time or with a wrong idea of where the target even is.
Firstly, of course, just by (realistically) limiting vest coverage to Chest (9-10), we've already made about a third of torso hits ignore the DR of plate inserts and ballistic panels. Now, I haven't yet found reliable statistics, but that seems on the high end already for many shootings, as one can easily find that in cases where LEOs or soldiers suffered a gunshot wound to the torso despite wearing body armor, the armor often sustained multiple hits in addition to the injury above or below the vest.
GURPS random hit locations already make limb, abdomen, neck and head injuries common, so vests are nowhere near a panacea. Also, targeting the pelvis or abdomen is not penalized harshly, at only -1, so deliberately bypassing ballistic vests is easy for skilled shooters.
I note that the 10" x 12" shooter cut plates of the Protech TAC PR Package are actually greater coverage than many typical vests with soft ballistic panels. If we give that level of coverage 4/6, it might or might not accurately reflect the probabilities that the armor will stop a round aimed at center mass. But given that 4/6 coverage of Chest is really 4/9 coverage of Torso, in terms of the odds of providing protection from a random Torso hit, this level of protection will fail more often than it works. Is that in line with testing and/or real world experience?
It would be quite useful if we could get a good idea of what realistic 4/6 Chest coverage amounts to in square inches, for typical cuts of rigid armor plate as well as for typical soft ballistic panels. If we can benchmark that, we can have armor that seems to have significantly improved coverage (5/6 and possibly 6/6) and possibly smaller plates that protect only the vitals and maybe the Chest on 3/6 or 2/6.