Knowing Your Own Strength - Tank Smasher

[naloth]

Originally Posted by Otaku

S'way dated information, but for a while I believe that Thor (without his ST enhancing magical belt - does he even have that anymore?) could life 100 tons. Just... if you wanted an example from Marvel.

IIRC the marvel handbook (or game system) put just about everything in Thor, Hercules, Hulk, etc in the same class 100 weight class meaning that they could bench over 100 tons. It's not terribly descriptive for the granularity that GURPS has.

I'd put them somewhere in the 50-100 range on this chart depending on the feat I would want them to accomplish. For outlandish things they would all have the ability to ultrapower something non-combat.

Really, though, the point was that compressing most any supers character to have a ST 100 or less, costing a reasonable amount of points (900 points at the top end usually significantly less) with no fatigue tricks to worry about and everyone using the same ST rules could be a nice step forwards.

[Infornific]

Originally Posted by naloth

I don't have the article unfortunately. The Supers rules had "human bullet" and rules for ripping off bits, but it was based on ST vs DR. Given that the overall ST value is much lower those won't work unless you also reduce DR proportionally.

I've been pondering what this system would like like in Supers terms.

ST 20 is about a max lift (BLx10) of 1 ton - say the movie Captain America
ST 30 would be about 10 tons - Spider-Man range
ST 40 would be about 100 tons - perhaps a touch high for the Thing or Colossus (subtract a few points). Perhaps a "calm" Hulk?
ST 50 1k tons - angry hulk (typical fighting mode)?
ST 60 10k tons
ST 70 100k tons
ST 80 1 million tons
ST 90 10 million tons
ST 100 100 million tons - perhaps Superman?

I think your numbers go up a little fast - isn't the Pyramid log ST *2 lift for +4 ST?

[naloth]

Originally Posted by Infornific

I think your numbers go up a little fast - isn't the Pyramid log ST *2 lift for +4 ST?

They might be off... I thought it was BLx10 for every +10 ST. ST 10 being 20 lbs, ST 20 being 200 lbs, ST 30 being 2000 lbs.

I arbitrarily called "max lift" BLx10 since anything over BLx10 costs 1 fatigue per second. Obviously you can lift/move more, but you've moved into the extreme (and possibly extra) effort rules.

[David Johansen]

I've generally been of the opinion that there needed to be something similar to Enhanced Move for Strength. Why? Because all the movement powers work that way and it's a common multiplier scale in GURPS. But maybe with the breakdown of 30 for x 2 lift, 50 for x 2 strike, and 20 for x 2 hp.

so for x 8 lifting Strength you'd be paying 90 points but for x 8 Strength you'd be paying 300. So, at that point for 400 points you could buy a 160 Strength. It's still not quite steep enough but there's also the issue of buying an armor divisor which I think models skin hard enough to punch through a tank.

[Infornific]

Originally Posted by David Johansen

I've generally been of the opinion that there needed to be something similar to Enhanced Move for Strength. Why? Because all the movement powers work that way and it's a common multiplier scale in GURPS. But maybe with the breakdown of 30 for x 2 lift, 50 for x 2 strike, and 20 for x 2 hp.

so for x 8 lifting Strength you'd be paying 90 points but for x 8 Strength you'd be paying 300. So, at that point for 400 points you could buy a 160 Strength. It's still not quite steep enough but there's also the issue of buying an armor divisor which I think models skin hard enough to punch through a tank.

In GURPS Supers, there kind of/sort of is. Once Super Effort ST gets going, you've got a situation where you boost Lifting and Striking ST by 50% for every level costing 40 points, or multiply them by ten for every six levels. Similarly IT: Damage Reduction lets you (in a sense) multiply hit points by ten for every 150 points.

So if you want to treat that as a genre specific Advantage, you could just create something like:

Super Strength [50/level] Each level multiplies ST as follows:

Level 1 = *1.5
Level 2 = *2
Level 3 = *3
Level 4 = *5
Level 5 = *7
Level 6 = *10

Every six more levels multiplies ST by ten again. This increases ST both for damage and calculating BL as well as giving the character equivalent damage reduction.

Striking only would cost 25/level, Lifting Only 15/level, Damage Reduction only would cost 10/level.

If that seems too cheap just up the cost per level. Try to stick to a multiple 10 so it is divisible by 5 and 2.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by David Johansen

I've generally been of the opinion that there needed to be something similar to Enhanced Move for Strength. Why? Because all the movement powers work that way and it's a common multiplier scale in GURPS. But maybe with the breakdown of 30 for x 2 lift, 50 for x 2 strike, and 20 for x 2 hp.
...

Enhanced Move is a limited Movement as it requires longer acceleration times and travel in a straight line.

[Leynok]

Originally Posted by David Johansen

I've generally been of the opinion that there needed to be something similar to Enhanced Move for Strength. Why? Because all the movement powers work that way and it's a common multiplier scale in GURPS. But maybe with the breakdown of 30 for x 2 lift, 50 for x 2 strike, and 20 for x 2 hp.

If you use Knowing Your Own Strength, then you'll find that +3 ST equals double the strength you had before.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Enhanced Move is a limited Movement as it requires longer acceleration times and travel in a straight line.

Not with the right Cosmics ;)

[Wavefunction]

Since in GURPS damage scales with the square root of Kinetic Energy, if we were to rescale the Knowing Your Own Strength damage table so it matches the basic lift table, we'd need to adjust it so that each +20 corresponds to x10 damage, and each +6 corresponds to x2. This would mean that each +1 was roughly x1.12. Using this and rounding down when possible, we get the following table:

ST     Thrust     Swing     BL
1      1d-3       1d-2      2.5
2      1d-3       1d-2      3.2
3      1d-3       1d-2      4.0
4      1d-2       1d-2      5.0
5      1d-2       1d-1      6.3
6      1d-2       1d-1      8.0
7      1d-2       1d-1      10
8      1d-1       1d        13
9      1d-1       1d        16
10     1d         1d+1      20
11     1d         2d-1      25
12     1d         2d-1      32
13     1d+1       2d        40
14     1d+2       2d+1      50
15     2d-1       3d-1      63
16     2d-1       3d        80
17     2d         3d+1      100
18     2d+1       4d-1      126
19     3d-1       4d+1      159
20     3d         5d-1      200
21     3d+1       5d+2      250
22     4d-1       6d        320
23     4d+1       7d        400
24     5d         8d-1      500
25     5d+2       9d-1      630
26     6d+1       10d-1     800
27     7d         11d       1,000
28     8d-1       12d+1     1,260
29     9d-1       14d       1,590
30     10d        16d-1     2,000

It's not the smoothest progression, but you could possibly fiddle with a few bits here and there to make it smoother. For ST 31+, start with a value in ST 10-29 range and multiply damage by 10 per +20 to ST.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Wavefunction

Since in GURPS damage scales with the square root of Kinetic Energy, if we were to rescale the Knowing Your Own Strength damage table so it matches the basic lift table, we'd need to adjust it so that each +20 corresponds to x10 damage, and each +6 corresponds to x2. This would mean that each +1 was roughly x1.12. Using this and rounding down when possible, we get the following table:

[ . . . ]

It's not the smoothest progression, but you could possibly fiddle with a few bits here and there to make it smoother. For ST 31+, start with a value in ST 10-29 range and multiply damage by 10 per +20 to ST.

All this talk makes me think if perhaps the post-LogST version of GURPS should have logarithmic damage, DR and HP values (like EABA), so that, say, every +N to a damage roll represents an ×10 increase in destructive capability.

[T.K.]

Originally Posted by CeeDub

Are we sure the problem is the ST and not the tank's armour? I think it's extremely difficult to compare and/or balance damage against DR. Maybe the DR is just too high?

Also, depending on how exactly you define "acceptable" breaks from reality, maybe punching a tank is the wrong approach in the first place. Force equals mass times acceleration. No matter how strong you are, you can only punch so fast without super-speed, and without gravity or density manipulation, you can only put so much weight behind a punch.

What I'd consider is using Lifting ST to rip the tank's turret off, then go to town on it's soft and juicy insides. Or pick it up and throw it, let it's own HP kill it with collision damage. The math is probably all wrong, but with the T-72A's weight of ~42 metric tonnes and your BL of 2E+72, you should be able to throw it about 2,520 yards. Even if the tank survives, the crew will not.

From a more game mechanical POV, I'd consider a house rule that says if you can throw it for X amount of collision damage, you can punch it for X-Y amount of damage (throwing is more akin to swing than thrust).

I also believe something along this line of thinking...

As an (almost dumb) example, I can easily lift a 16kg kettlebell (girya) but no matter how hard I punch it, I'll never blow through it.

Certainly part of the problem is my hand lack of DR which makes me hurt myself when punching such hard surface, but even considering if I had such DR to not hurt my hand, my punching power is not even close to enough to make it happen.

Another example, on a daily basis I carry or move punching bags all around. Often times we do training involving throwing them, rolling or some combination of movement while carrying them.

Even though we can manipulate it, lift it, carry it over distances, throw it, there're bags there that we've been punching, kicking, kneeling as strong as we can for more than 1 year and they're still (almost) intact.

The only problem I have as well, is how big the difference seems to be...but it should be considered that while the super in question does have the ST to lift many earths, he won't be able to do so mainly because he can't apply such lifting force to the whole earth.

Even if we go 4-color level, such supers would only be able to lift a single building or quarter block before it brakes apart from the rest.
Going super 4-color style, you could allow entire mountains to be lifted whole but that's about it.