Quote:
Originally Posted by acrosome
My response is that calling the two IBA groin panels "level IIIA" is probably optimistic. I'd look into that a bit, first. But generally, yeah, soft armor is not meant to stop rifle bullets.
GURPS is a model, and to be playable it cannot be comprehensive to reality. If it were, what you'd have is some sort of AI reality simulation, and one combat second would take 32 years to play out. So there are going to be corners where it fails spectacularly. (Another is attacks against some structures and ships, which are WAY too easy to destroy in GURPS. There are others.) I'd wager that someone wearing four sets of Point Blank were not considered in the playtest.
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Definitely this case is in this pitfall, but the beauty of the system is that GMs are not required to follow ALL book rules by rote to all situations encountered. I was wandering a scenario like the North Hollywood Shootout for a Cops or SWAT Campaign with the adversaries with homemade armor, when I read the article.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Varyon
From what I understand, penetrated armor protects much less than GURPS suggests. A simplified version is that the square of armor protects against the square of damage - so if those armors were, say, DR 8, 12, 12, and 12, that's not DR 44, it's DR (64+144+144+144)^(1/2)=22, which still should have been enough to stop the 20 damage of the shot - it's possible our DR values are off, or the damage is off. A gameable version of this rule is to state that, if damage is greater than DR, divide DR by 3 to determine how much it reduces damage by. Above, we'll round that DR 8 up to DR 9, in which case the first layer is penetrated (17 damage remaining of our 20), as is the second (13 remains) and third (9 remains), but the fourth is enough to stop the bullet. Something is definitely off, particularly with the fact that the bullet apparently had enough chutzpah left to punch through an estimated 20 inches of flesh - which works out to right around 20 damage on its own (flesh is roughly DR 1/inch). That implies that, if the bullet can get through soft armor, it outright ignores it, rather than just reducing it via a difference of squares approach (or the simplified divide by 3 method, which tends to give very similar results). That, or the bullet in question has some sort of armor divisor to it.
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For sure I could say that reviewing Douglas Cole’s
blog, I found stats for .300 AAC, and for an approximately 14.5 inch barrel, the damage is actually 5d, not 5d+2, as I put above. So the damage is definitely off. AFAIK the cartridge described would not have any modifiers, as armor divisor, in GURPS.
Your approach is appealing, still it not answers what happen. I was wondering if the armor used in the “test” were in good shape, i.e., could have its performance degraded by lower HT?