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Old 05-07-2017, 10:52 AM   #12
Varyon
 
Join Date: Jun 2013
Default Re: High Amounts of non penetrating damage. Bullets VS Plate Carriers

First off, all piercing attacks should have something like a crushing component to them, for things like knockback, blunt trauma, etc. For firearms, this is somewhere around 1/3rd of the actual damage (this seems to scale slowly with projectile size - Pi is around 1/3, Pi+ is around 1/2.5, Pi++ is around 1/2, at least on the lower end, as GURPS doesn't have a Pi+++ or larger category). For rigid armor, what happens with a non-penetrating, non-deforming (no dents, cracks, etc) hit is that you essentially have the impactor and plate become a single entity with the same momentum as before, pushing into the target. With a breastplate, this is a huge area, so you end up with no real injury. With a trauma plate, it may be smaller, so with that same amount of energy focused into a smaller area, you can get into some actual wounding, although that's not very likely - the energy needed to harm the wearer is usually more than enough to cause deformation of the plate.

With deformation, the easiest way to think of it is as a dent - all that energy gets focused into a much smaller area, so there's more potential for wounding. Actually deforming the plate burns up a decent amount of energy, however, which complicates matters. This is where you see the potential for broken ribs and the like.

My planned Armor and Wounding Overhaul is intended to have this as an integral part of it, but that's nowhere near ready to post, and changes things a lot more than just "Bullets can cause blunt trauma." For the latter, flexible armor should result in 1 point of Blunt Trauma for every 20 points of Pi-, 15 points of Pi, 12 points of Pi+, or 10 points of Pi++ (cannons and the like already typically do crushing). Ceramic trauma plates should probably count as flexible, as they deform (shatter) fairly readily, but having them downgrade the piercing class (Pi+ becomes Pi) for purposes of Blunt Trauma may be appropriate (to represent the energy absorbed by deformation). Truly rigid armor - including steel trauma plates - result in no injury if piercing damage does not exceed something like half DR. If it does exceed half DR, the armor suffers some degree of deformation, which doesn't impact its ability to continue functioning but can transfer some injury to the target - use the above progression, but downgrade the piercing class by two steps (Pi+ becomes Pi-). For armor with different performance against piercing damage rather than crushing, like Kevlar, you may wish to convert damage to crushing to see if actual damage gets through, rather than just Blunt Trauma. To convert, divide Pi- damage by 4, Pi by 3, Pi+ by 2.5, and Pi++ by 2. Note you may wish to do this for very light targets as well, to determine how much knockback your orichalcum-armored pixie suffers when he takes a blunderbuss to the chest.
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