GURPS 4e and Autoduel armor options

[Ed the Coastie]

In GURPS Autoduel, a vehicle could optionally have Surface-Hardened armor that raised PD at the expense of DR, or Honeycomed armor that raised DR at the expense of PD.

However, in GURPS 4e, there is no longer PD...so the armor options no longer work.

Does anyone have a workaround other than just declaring that the vehicle in question has a DR of whatever?

[Anthony]

I don't really see a reason to bother; what distinction are you trying to model?

[David Johnston2]

Wouldn't honeycombed armour would now be Ablative Armour, initially giving better DR but less able to take a long term pounding? Would "surface hardened" armor be actual Hardened?

[Dwarf99]

Why not just ignore Armor Divisors on attacks the way the Hardened Modifier for DR now works?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Ed the Coastie

In GURPS Autoduel, a vehicle could optionally have Surface-Hardened armor that raised PD at the expense of DR, or Honeycomed armor that raised DR at the expense of PD.

However, in GURPS 4e, there is no longer PD...so the armor options no longer work.

Does anyone have a workaround other than just declaring that the vehicle in question has a DR of whatever?

You need to move to 4e armor concepts and ways to modify those. If the listed modifiers only changed DR you'd be left with distinguishing features related to cost per pt of DR or weight per pt of DR (or both).

Just going by concept Surface Hardened certainly sounds like a level f the Hardened modifier. Honeycombed is harder especially if your 4e Autoduel armor is already Ablative.

It's also an important question if your looking at converting Autoduel 1e or 2e. 1e was a pre-High Tech 1e (pre Basic 3e too) book and was based off of unrealistic concepts about firearms damage. I seem to remember 3D machineguns.

Autoduel 2e was based off of Ve2 and little conversion is necessary.

Your armor mods sound like something from a 1e supplement and simple conversion based on a mathematical formula might not be possible.

[Ed the Coastie]

Most of what I have been fiddling with has been from old 1e stuff. (One of my PCs is a world-jumper originally from Steel, and he particularly likes the Autoduel parallel.) I'm not actually all that worried about it, since I have been using more of a "by guess and by gosh / whatever feels right" adaptation rather than a strict mechanical conversion. I was just interested in seeing how others may have handled it.