Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
Hm. My experience is that GURPS armor numbers usually outperform what is actually possible by a fairly significant margin, so I'm curious what numbers you're working with.
That said, body armor can certainly outperform vehicular armor, but it's also much more expensive.
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AR500 Armor plates, from, well, the company AR500 Armor, rated NIJ Level III (thus needs to stop GURPS damage 24.5, i.e. DR 25), and weighing 5.5 lbs. for a 10" x 12" plate.
I'm aware that the company was subject to a recall in 2016, specifically for claiming higher proof than all of its armour could meet, but these are their currently offered products, ones who presumably passed muster in place of the recalled ones.
That being said, AR500 steel alloy plates are made by other companies as well and the resistance to bullet penetration is not implausible in itself. Such steel
is used, for example, in making steel targets to shoot that are light enough to move when struck, but don't get damaged, so being proof against bullets at the same time as being lightweight is kind of the primary design goal of the material, long before anyone started using it as wearable armour (well, trauma plates).
Spalling and ricochets make such armour much riskier than other, more expensive kind of ballistic inserts, but as far as DR goes, abrasion resistant steel alloys with extremely high hardness appear to legitimately possess enough to stop high-powered rifle rounds with fairly thin and light plates.
There is no problem with a TL8 steel alloy with a Cost of ca $20 per point of DR to a square foot significantly outperforming the TL6 'Hard Steel' from Pulver's ''Cutting-Edge Armor Design' in Pyramid #3/85, which only has a Cost of $3.5 for the same metric.
After all, higher TL and more expensive materials are
supposed to perform better. It's like a fundamental assumption of GURPS armour design. The problem is that there is already a material meant to represnt advanced TL8 steel alloys statted in the article and by the stats you would need about 20% heavier plates of it to get enough DR to stop standard velocity M80 7.62x51mm NATO.
Game mechanically, it would therefore be elegant to give armour made from AR500 steel alloy up to 50% higher DR against piercing attacks than some (or all) other attacks. It would prevent it from outperforming the same weight of TL8 'Ultra-Hard Steel', at $30 per point of DR a square foot, which is meant to represent cutting-edge stuff like triple hardened steels and nano-crystalline steels.
On the other hand, I'm not sure whether AR500 steels are any worse at resisting other kinds of attacks. Yes, it seems fairly intuitive that very high surface hardness would be more helpful against small, fast-moving penetrators with less hardness than the armour, than it would be against, for example, crushing damage, but these
are wear-resistant steel alloys, also used in heavy construction, mining, etc.
But there has to be
some reason actual TL8 vehicular armour is made from different steel alloys, if it's made from steel. The practical difficulties involved in making stuff other than Solid sheets of flat or gently curving plates out of such high hardness steel alloys might be one reason. I was sort of hoping that there might be other reasons, as well.