Question about bone armor

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Ejidoth

The rule for semi-ablative DR is (from B47), "When an attack strikes semi-ablative DR, every 10 points of basic damage rolled removes one point of DR, regardless of whether the attack penetrates DR."

So stuff like armor divisor really doesn't matter, because it doesn't matter how much damage the armor blocks, just how much pre-damage armor there was in total. Take that total number, divide by 10, round down, and that's how much DR is lost after the attack.

So, to refer back to the example earlier,



The armor has DR 3. It gets hit by a metal weapon that does 10 points of damage, it loses 1 DR. It gets hit by a stone weapon that does 10 points of damage, it loses 1 DR. The amount of damage that it blocks and the amount of damage that 'get through' are different, but the actual ablation is the same: 1 DR per 10 damage.

I'm not the first one in this thread to point this out, but it seems like this detail is getting missed.

Nice to have a RAW quotation. Seems reasonable. TY!

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Most armor is somewhat to fully ablative if you look at a small enough area, it's just that it's usually more along the lines of creating a new chink in armor (targetable at -8) than reducing the overall DR.

As HP goes down in Damage to Armor, there's lower penalty to target chinks. While that might be "I'm making an existing holes bigger" it might also be "there's more holes to choose from" like how there's no penalty to hit -4 extremities so long as you didn't care about targeting one particular extremity and rolled one on random hit location.

Originally Posted by Ejidoth

The rule for semi-ablative DR is (from B47), "When an attack strikes semi-ablative DR, every 10 points of basic damage rolled removes one point of DR, regardless of whether the attack penetrates DR."

So stuff like armor divisor really doesn't matter, because it doesn't matter how much damage the armor blocks, just how much pre-armor damage there was in total. Take that total number, divide by 10, round down, and that's how much DR is lost after the attack.

Except 2013 example of Drills...

Originally Posted by Kromm

You have DR 96, HP 80.
Repeated huge piercing attacks (pi++) lower DR as if ablative (footnote, p. B559), to a minimum DR 3.
Against a homogenous target like concrete, huge piercing has a wounding modifier of ×1/2 once it penetrates DR (p. B380).

With 2d+2 pi++, you'll average 9 points of damage per second. You'll need 10 seconds to ablate DR 90, leaving DR 6. On the 11th second, you'll put 3 points past DR 6, which will inflict 1 HP, and also ablate down to DR 3. Then you'll be putting 6 points per second past the minimum DR 3, inflicting 3 HP per second, for the next 26-27 seconds. Total time: 37-38 seconds.

With 2d+2(2) pi++, you'll average 9 points of damage per second. But now DR is halved! You'll need five seconds to ablate DR 45, leaving DR 3. Then you'll be putting 8 points per second past half the minimum DR 3, inflicting 4 HP per second, for the next 20 seconds. Total time: 25 seconds.

The impression here is that armor divisors do help ablate DR faster, which I guess would also mean that armor multipliers (fractional divisors) might ablate DR slower?

This might only apply if you're keeping an attack zeroed on a small spot though, because it sounds like this doesn't amount to overall DR loss based on Kromm's followup...

Originally Posted by Kromm

Where does either rule say, "ignore armor divisors"? Nowhere, because you don't do that. An attack with a divisor faces less DR in the first place. It's this DR that's reduced, not full DR. If I have a divisor (2), then I need to carve away DR 40 to get through a DR 80 ablative target. On the other hand, if another attack comes along, I've only carved away DR 40, so that attack still faces DR 40, because the DR just has a little hole in it.

Please check my examples again. Nowhere am I using injury. I only start applying the injury rules once the damage begins to penetrate DR. That's when homogenous kicks in.

The fact that pi++ is treated as ablative, not semi-ablative. The footnote on p. B559 is quite explicit on this point: "Repeated impaling, piercing, and large piercing . . . semi-ablative; repeated burning, corrosion, crushing, cutting, or huge piercing . . . ablative." And p. B47 is quite clear on how ablative DR works; namely, it's carved away on 1:1 basis by damage points. This is why just about all tools intended for slicing through bulk matter are either burning (burn) or huge piercing (pi++).

B558 divides walls into 1 hex (10 square foot) portions so I'm not sure if that's what Kromm meant by 'another attack comes along' (targeting full DR on another hex of wall) or if he means full DR applies even when targeting the same hex.

Attacking the DR again from full makes sense since you can have multiple drill holes in a 3x3 section of wall. At the same time, there should be some means of "picking up where you left off" where DR is already compromised, maybe like a 'chinks' or 'wounded' hit location?

B558's asterisk applies to wood/brick/stone/concrete but not steel, makes me wonder if a rule like that could be applied to bone. Surgeons do drill through skull DR in some cases I think, and you'd need to ablate the DR to get access via your tools that do less than 3 damage

Aside from ablative/semi-ablatiev DR you also have normal DR getting ablated by corrisve attack, B61 gives -1 DR per 5 damage normally, so that might be -12 DR per 10 damage if fully-ablative or -3 DR per 10 damage if semi-ablative?

Powers The Weird 21's "intensified corrosion" also has a 1:1 ratio (treating normal DR like fully ablative DR) and I don't know if that's meant to work extra-well against already-fully-ablative DR (maybe 1 damage removes 2 DR) or semi-ablative DR (10 damage removes 11 DR?) it depends on if this is additive/multiplicative or replacive.

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

Fully ablative would be odd for armor because it would imply that (say) a bullet piercing a hole through a breastplate would render the entire rest of the breastplate completely useless.

Originally Posted by Anders

Something that shatters. An obsidian breastplate.

That's not far off the performance of an old-school frangible plate - which, granted, is an armour insert not a piece of armour in itself, but in general each plate was good for about one hit.

[Say, it isn't that bad!]

Originally Posted by Anders

I'm using HP to keep track of how many points it has stopped.

Edit: So how many HP should each use of Armoury restore. I'm thinking that 1 hour of repairs restores MoS times two "HP" (minimum 1) and uses up... say $1d worth of resources. Bone armour isn't very expensive.

One answer, I guess, is "make an Armoury job roll; the result is how much $ worth of armour gets repaired."

[Say, it isn't that bad!]

Originally Posted by Plane

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