Quote:
Originally Posted by Varyon
From the looks of things, the shear thickening fluid (which is probably the bulk of the armor's weight) has comparable - but possibly a bit better - protection to arachnoweave. I'd probably go with a WM of 0.025, 110 DR/in (MaxDR 55), and CM of $710. The lower the proportion of STF, however, the better these stats are going to get.
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That looks pretty reasonable, I'll use those stats unless Douglas himself gets in on this and gives me a different answer.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Varyon
Honestly, I'd ignore the UT and HT armors and just design things using the Pyramid article. UT has a lot of issues involved with it already, and HT, as noted, didn't really get into the specifics of partial protection (pretty much all modern armor gives only partial protection).
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The Pyramid article is clearly designed with HT and UT in mind, so using it doesn't really solve much. I'll stat out two examples:
Concealable Vest
5.25 square feet
Improved ballistic polymer
Optimized fabric
DR 12/5*
Weight: 5.25*0.04*0.8*12 ≈ 2 lbs.
Cost: 2*$250*2 = $1,000
Reflex Vest
5.25 square feet
STF liquid armor
Fabric
DR 12/4*
Weight: 5.25*0.032*1*12 ≈ 2 lbs.
Cost: 2*$150*1 = $300
Both have stats in line with their respective UT and HT equivalents. Admittedly the Reflex Vest is a lot cheaper than the Concealable Vest, but you'd damn well expect it to be. Of course it also doesn't have chinks, but enemies not being able to take a
-8 or
-10 to halve your DR doesn't seem like a huge benefit. However, I suppose if I make the Reflex Vest optimized fabric, I can get a DR of 15/5* for the same weight, which is a slight improvement. If you do the same for Arachnoweave you get DR of around 16/4*. Doing the same thing with the stats you gave for STF Arachnoweave we get (treating it as optimized fabric):
Improved Reflex Vest
5.25 square feet
STF Arachnoweave
Optimized Fabric
DR 19/6*
Weight: 5.25*0.025*0.8*19 ≈ 2 lbs.
Cost: 2*$710*2 = $2,820
Which seems like a good value for a higher quality concealable ballistic vest, if we make it normal fabric instead of optimized, we can get a DR of 15/5*, which is still pretty decent.
Another problem is that article doesn't really go into what kind of armor/how much armor can easily be worn on limbs/made into gloves, which is one of the important distinctions between HT and UT ballistic armor.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Varyon
The ABA is based on Pinnacle Armor's Dragon Skin - more specifically, it's based on the previously-claimed (and now-disputed) statements on how well the armor performed. Dragon Skin is actually something like Improved Ceramic scale armor (not allowed by the article, but should be doable, as should plate inserts - the various Ceramics should probably be R/S, not Solid; I should note here that the CW of scale is inconsistent with LT, and should probably be 1.6 instead of 1.1), possibly built something like a jazerant inside of Improved Kevlar or Improved Ballistic Fiber (the actual Dragon Skin armor apparently uses non-ballistic textile, some sort of glass fiber, but I don't see why you couldn't/wouldn't use something better). Looking at Wikipedia, 0.83 sf of Level III protection (DR 35 vs Pi) weighs 6.4 lb, for a functional WM of 0.22. As it's basically just the ceramic, adjusting for the 1.6 CW of scale means an actual WM of 0.1375 - which is probably close enough to the 0.15 of TL 8 Improved Ceramic. DR 35 is too high to be concealable, however - you'd need to drop it to 22 for that (even TL9 ceramic can only give you up to DR 33 with concealable armor).
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I imagine that CW multiplier for scale has gone down because in a higher TL society the links between the scales can be made much lighter and less bulky. I guess I'll do what you suggest and build that, and any more advanced equivalents as a combination of ballistic fiber and scale.
Thanks for your help.