10-23-2018, 05:14 AM | #21 | |
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: The Kingdom of Insignificance
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Re: [AtE] Wasteland vehicle improvised weaponry
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Player suggested ripping the IC motor out, sticking some scavenged wheel hub EC motors, as well as a couple of motor car battery packs in the floor of the tray (the void between the chassis frame?). Recharged by deploying folding PV panels, and/or a trailer mounted gassifer/EC generator with a stash of charcoal. If the front radiator and engine block are removed, the front armour only needs to cover the suspension and whatever else is in the former engine compartment. And can be angled like a wedge. Or... am I missing something. Oh, my... so need to spring that on the PCs.
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It's all very well to be told to act my age, but I've never been this old before... Last edited by Luke Bunyip; 10-23-2018 at 05:20 AM. |
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10-23-2018, 07:25 AM | #22 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: [AtE] Wasteland vehicle improvised weaponry
Sloping your armour, the way the frontal armour of tanks often is, is only advantageous if the stuff inside can fill the sloped shape efficiently, or if sloping would mean less framing to support the armour. If it can't, you gain little or nothing.
Removing the engine and having a simple wedge plus wheel guards might well work. OTOH, you might need that volume for more batteries, as there's likely less free space under the tray than you think. Oh, and having a trailer to carry extra fuel, etc., has not gone well in the past for armoured vehicles.
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10-23-2018, 08:15 AM | #23 |
Join Date: Nov 2013
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Re: [AtE] Wasteland vehicle improvised weaponry
[QUOTE=Rupert;2217857] Sloping your armour, the way the frontal armour of tanks often is, is only advantageous if the stuff inside can fill the sloped shape efficiently, or if sloping would mean less framing to support the armour. If it can't, you gain little or nothing. [QUOTE]
Should gain quite a bit from it actually if only increasing dramatically the number of shots that glance off due to not archiving a decent impact angle. It should however be considerably more difficult to build and likely heavier when not able to design the vehicle from ground up for sloped armor. Might still be something for the front of some vehicles. One thing with armoring up a vehicle this way however is that I'd guess that some parts you really want to armor up like windows and especially radiators don't really work well if you do so and under extra strain I'm guessing heat will be a big problem. That's without going into all the problems the weight put on the body I guess breakdowns of a wide variation of drivetrain and suspension parts will be regular business. |
10-23-2018, 12:07 PM | #24 | |
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: The Land of Enchantment
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Re: [AtE] Wasteland vehicle improvised weaponry
A PIAT or other spigot mortar would be pretty easy to cobble together with various warheads. Black powder, napalm, harpoon, etc. Imagine something like a wheeled Ontos with a half dozen PIATs.
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I'd need to get a grant and go shoot a thousand goats to figure it out. Last edited by acrosome; 10-23-2018 at 12:14 PM. |
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10-23-2018, 05:33 PM | #25 | ||
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: The Kingdom of Insignificance
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Re: [AtE] Wasteland vehicle improvised weaponry
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Seriously, my setting is an AtE Australia. Automatic weaponry is rare down here. A motorised repeating arbalest, or a pneumatically powered harpoon or spud gun is as good as any of my players PCs are going to have access to.
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It's all very well to be told to act my age, but I've never been this old before... |
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10-23-2018, 08:59 PM | #26 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Austin, TX
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Re: [AtE] Wasteland vehicle improvised weaponry
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Take the front grill of that F-350: it's normally 6.7' * 3.5' at 90 to the ground. Incline it back to 60 degrees, and it's a 4' plate to reach the same height, plus you need to add some triangles to cover the gaps. You can use thinner plate to make up the weight - I think it works out to 8.5mm thickness at an inclide has the same protection as 10mm at right angles - if you can guarantee that no one is going to shoot at your car from a higher elevation. Quote:
Charcoal has an energy density of 1.4 MJ/L, petroleum about 35 MJ/L. They've both got about the same specific gravity, or near enough. So for every 20L of petrol you had in the F-350's tank, you need to provide 500L of charcoal bunkerage to get the equivalent range, not counting the extra weight of 480L of charcoal (~360 kg if I'm doing the math right). Gassifiers and charcoal engines are mostly renewable, while petroleum mostly isn't. If the choice was between a charcoal gassifer and walking or riding a horse, I'd go with the gassifier. But I'd be extremely loathe to rip out a perfectly functional petroleum engine and replace with anything else until I had completely exhausted the expected supply of petroleum in the reasonable scavenging area.
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10-23-2018, 09:04 PM | #27 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Austin, TX
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Re: [AtE] Wasteland vehicle improvised weaponry
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I wouldn't try up armoring a sedan in the same way - it takes nearly as much armor and most cars are not built to carry 4+ tons. Armoring the radiator is a little tricky but airscoops are a possibility.
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10-24-2018, 11:37 AM | #28 | ||
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: [AtE] Wasteland vehicle improvised weaponry
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Now, the slope will allow a thinner plate to stop a bullet than having it square on. However, sloping it also means you need more area of plate, and this cancels out. That leaves you relying on the odds of 'bouncing' bullets to give added protection, and in my experience without hardening it's not really a thing except at extreme angles. Quote:
The added weight of armour on these vehicles was always a problem, as it increased wear and tear, increased fuel consumption, impaired speed and handling, and massive reduced the payload they could carry.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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10-24-2018, 11:45 AM | #29 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Wellington, NZ
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Re: [AtE] Wasteland vehicle improvised weaponry
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Assuming your standard mild steel, at DR56/inch (B558-559), this means about 0.43" (say 11mm) of plate. A half-inch plate (12.7mm) gives DR28 and is quite good protection from 7d, and near-complete protection from the 5d damage of .223/5.56mm rounds (or the 5d+1 of 7.62x39mm bullets). As a rule of thumb, a plate one inch thick weighs 40 pounds per square foot - serious armour gets heavy very quickly.
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Rupert Boleyn "A pessimist is an optimist with a sense of history." |
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10-24-2018, 11:56 AM | #30 |
Join Date: Aug 2010
Location: The Land of Enchantment
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Re: [AtE] Wasteland vehicle improvised weaponry
I'm really amused at how some people want to make this sound impossible (that is, improvised vehicle armor) when people have been doing it effectively for about a century. The original Rolls Royce armored car was built on requisitioned Silver Ghost chassis, and was actually pretty awesome for the era. A number of others were similar. And, no, you don't end up with the equivalent of an MBT, but you do end up with better small arms and fragmentation protection, which does count for a lot. (Especially in an AtE setting where you're hardly going to encounter RPGs behind every bush.) So now, just as when we all posted links to Khyber Pass copies to refute the people who thought it was impossible to build a functioning firearm yourself, here we go:
The Kurds have made quite a few impressive examples recently. Other interesting stuff has come out pf the Syrian Civil War, too. Some look suspiciously like an A7V, built on construction-machinery chassis. In the video you can see them obviously being used en mass with combined arms tactics. Drug cartels are getting into the act as well. The Poles in WWII. If you have some organization you can make pretty decent examples, like the Soviets did in WWII in some besieged cities. Though, those were almost official types, frankly. So don't think so much about bolting plates onto an F-350. Instead, think of stripping the entire body off of the F-350, leaving only the chassis and powertrain. Then you can get a lot more creative and effective in your armored body design, including incorporating some slope. Or even better use a 10-wheeled dump truck or Caterpillar D7 or D9 dozer instead of the F-350. For inspiration, look what the British and Serbians did with the Caterpillars. The Israeli D9R at the top is even more impressive, though again that was more of an official type standard.
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I'd need to get a grant and go shoot a thousand goats to figure it out. Last edited by acrosome; 10-24-2018 at 12:11 PM. |
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