Magic munchkinism on a WWII tank

[Derago]

A player of mine was reading through Magic, and found the combination of Essential Earth followed by Earth to Stone (or metal) and wants to combine that with the idea of rebuillding a WWII tank (during WWII) using this combination to either reduce a tank's weight or greatly increase its defense.
The M4A1 in High Tech has 210DR on the front which could become 630 with this combination (a scary surprise when the germans discover this tank is tougher than a Tiger!) or it's weight could be reduced by maybe 25-50% by making the most of the super lighweight metal! How fast would it go then?

Your thoughts? How many cubic yards of metal are in a Sherman tank? How much of its weight could be shed by replacing it with Essential Metal?

[Silvermane]

Frankly I wouldn't allow this without a combination of a very high engineering skill AND the success of magic.

Unless he's making the materials and having someone else put it together.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Derago

How many cubic yards of metal are in a Sherman tank? How much of its weight could be shed by replacing it with Essential Metal?

Well, it weighs about 30 tones, and is basically all metal, almost all steel, with a density of around 8. So it's around 3.75 cubic metres, or 5 cubic yards.

Replacing it with metal of three times the strength will allow substantial weight reductions, but the engineering rolls will get progressively harder as you approach the goal of a third the weight. Tanks are pretty complicated vehicles.

[Blind Mapmaker]

Keep in mind that the casting must be done separately for each piece. If you do it in one single block, you will need essential flame to forge it and let's not forget the wear and tear on tools (see Thaumatology: Urban Magics p. 31). Also you'd basically have to rebuild the tank by hand. Even just putting on armour plating will be project that is measured in weeks at the very least. This gets even worse once you armour the tracks. If you don't, your enemies will certainly try and take away your mobility that way. And you better remember to armour the bottom, too.

I wouldn't try and prevent your players from doing such a thing. Instead remind them that even with an invulnerable tank there a ways of immobilising them and putting them into trouble. And yes, they should have crazy high skills in Armoury, Engineer, Mechanic and possibly Thaumatology or something similar before they should even think about pulling this off. If you want to forbid it, take a leaf from Dungeon Fantasy and have all created materials vanish after a day. That way they can bolt on a sheet of essential metal onto the glacis if they fear heavy opposition, but won't be doing this regularly.

[Michele]

Originally Posted by Derago

A player of mine was reading through Magic, and found the combination of Essential Earth followed by Earth to Stone (or metal) and wants to combine that with the idea of rebuillding a WWII tank (during WWII) using this combination to either reduce a tank's weight or greatly increase its defense.
The M4A1 in High Tech has 210DR on the front which could become 630 with this combination (a scary surprise when the germans discover this tank is tougher than a Tiger!) or it's weight could be reduced by maybe 25-50% by making the most of the super lighweight metal! How fast would it go then?

Your thoughts? How many cubic yards of metal are in a Sherman tank? How much of its weight could be shed by replacing it with Essential Metal?

If the player is department head at one of the factories producing armor for Shermans, then yes, I think he could end up with a Sherman armored with essential metal. He'd need to provide the plant with essential metal for one vehicle in place of ordinary steel.

On the contrary, I don't think he could do it in the field. These spells produce, IMHO, the raw material. Then you still need to work it. In the case of an orichalcum armor set, a character may come up, one way or another, with the required amount of metal, but he still needs to be, or to hire, an armorer.
Going from a big lump of essential metal to a finished Sherman, with cast or rolled homogenous armor not made of steel but of essential metal, is similar - just harder.

The alternative to being in control of an actual production plant is that the character follows the guidelines of Create Object. He would need to be extremely well informed as to the design and production processes of ordinary armor for the Sherman tank, if he only wants to create an armor shell; or with the production processes of the whole damn machine, if he wants a ready-to-use tank. Schematics (the Tech College spell) is probably necessary.

A typical in-the-field jury-rigging was adding just about any sort of applique armor - which included dumb things like timber or sandbags - to tanks. This could be done, I believe, with the spells you mention and with Shape Metal. What one obtains is additional armor, which adds weight and thus reduces the tank's performance, but if the additional armor is a plate of essential metal, then he gets three times the DR for the weight he is adding.
Even in this case, strict realism would require the raw plate of essential metal to be hot-rolled or face-hardened, etc., in order to reach the actual DR values of armor, x3. But maybe you would be willing to ignore that.

That said, I'm glad to hear that you are playing a WWII-with-magic campaign! If you have time, let us know more.

[vierasmarius]

I wonder how feasible it would be to up-armor an existing vehicle with Essential plating. This certainly wouldn't be as efficient (in terms of DR per lb) as making it with Essential armor to begin with, but would be far easier and could give them an edge. Of course, then the enemy might break out AP rounds with Essential penetrator cores... or even use Essential gunpowder as a propellant.

[Derago]

Originally Posted by Michele

If the player is department head at one of the factories producing armor for Shermans, then yes, I think he could end up with a Sherman armored with essential metal. He'd need to provide the plant with essential metal for one vehicle in place of ordinary steel.

On the contrary, I don't think he could do it in the field. These spells produce, IMHO, the raw material. Then you still need to work it. In the case of an orichalcum armor set, a character may come up, one way or another, with the required amount of metal, but he still needs to be, or to hire, an armorer.
Going from a big lump of essential metal to a finished Sherman, with cast or rolled homogenous armor not made of steel but of essential metal, is similar - just harder.

The alternative to being in control of an actual production plant is that the character follows the guidelines of Create Object. He would need to be extremely well informed as to the design and production processes of ordinary armor for the Sherman tank, if he only wants to create an armor shell; or with the production processes of the whole damn machine, if he wants a ready-to-use tank. Schematics (the Tech College spell) is probably necessary.

A typical in-the-field jury-rigging was adding just about any sort of applique armor - which included dumb things like timber or sandbags - to tanks. This could be done, I believe, with the spells you mention and with Shape Metal. What one obtains is additional armor, which adds weight and thus reduces the tank's performance, but if the additional armor is a plate of essential metal, then he gets three times the DR for the weight he is adding.
Even in this case, strict realism would require the raw plate of essential metal to be hot-rolled or face-hardened, etc., in order to reach the actual DR values of armor, x3. But maybe you would be willing to ignore that.

That said, I'm glad to hear that you are playing a WWII-with-magic campaign! If you have time, let us know more.

We haven't been playing a fullblown campaign or anything like that. I have been slowly developing a tank- / armored vehicle- centric WWII setting that results from no fixed or rotary wing aircraft. They just don't exist - that type of technology just doesn't work. Magic, however, does.

We have several quick rules for cambat against vehicles that speed things along and suggest certain tactics. One example is that the SM of a vehicle is the that of the whole when viewed from its largest dimension (usually the side), the SM is one less when from the front, and vehicles with turrets are (generally) one SM less for hull and turret. I think I wrote that in a messed up way, so here's an example:

PzKpfw IV:
Total: SM+4 (side), SM+3 (front/back)
Turret: SM+3 (side), SM+2 (front/back)
Hull: SM+3 (side), SM+2 (front/back)

We don't actually use a table like this in game because it plays so fast (-1 for front on; -1 if targetting hull or turret)

We also have rules for targetting (and repairing) tracks, and several others.

I've been using the rules from the Alternate GURPS Pyramid for keeping large vehicles alive and calculating HP. I've also just told the players to go crazy with ideas on how magic would be applied to various aspects.

The essential earth idea was one of the recent ones which I am working on a rule of thumb for somewhere along the line of establishing a percentage of weight (per vehicle) that is armor. It'll be a basic ruling, perhaps:

Light tank: 20%
Medium tank: 40%
Heavy tank: 60%
Super heavy: 80%

That'll be the percentage of the vehicle that could be made lighter (I've ruled that this spell would primarily apply to large armor plating rather than replacing every bolt and piece of sheet metal with it. I've also ruled that Essential Metal is 3x stronger than the best mild steel (DR 60/inch) and is thus DR 180/inch.

Other things the players have come up with is Cornucopia magazines for the tank ammunition. They put two in each tank (for HE and AP). Welded-on symbols that blur the vehicle (I ruled it as a max effect of 5 minus SM, doubled). They came up with several others besides obvious ones like enchanting the guns. Using Transparency to make transparent armor plates that replace the armor glass, etc...

[Michele]

Thanks, sounds like fun.