Why does UT concealable armor suck?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

So you're saying that if you shoot at the arms and legs (at penalties), after having shot a guy ten times in the torso, you should have no problem inflicting some damage on the guy?

That's not a strategy that I would call battlefield-viable. By the time you've managed to do that "in a dark alleyway," he's already killed you.

I'm saying that you and your buddies spray him with fire (taking random hit locations) and he's got to respect it. It won't kill him in one hit, but if he doesn't take the hint and get suppressed it will do the job.

If you want enough gun to actually have something like a fair shot one-on-one against a heavy powersuit trooper, well, that's the reason people talk about the ETK storm carbine with APEP. Or at the very least, the ETK assault carbine firing APEP on boost. But we're too cheap to issue APEP for these occasions, aren't we?

Originally Posted by Mailanka

EDIT: Worse, your core point was that 10mm HEMP was useful against both light and heavy infantry, as opposed to 7mm which was only viable against light, but with the contortions you're doing here, you could argue that a guy with a 7mm ETK APHC round could "just as easily" penetrate power armor. You just shoot for the "chinks in the armor." Sure, it's absurdly hard, but no harder than wearing down a guys EMA and then going for his foot. You might even pull it off in one turn...

No, because you don't need to make called shots to hit limbs. You've got a decent probability of hitting something other than the heavily shielded locations with any stray round. In fact, a lot of your shots are going to be suppressive so you can't pick your hit locations.

Also, I'm hardly the one who introduced 'it penetrates limbs, thus it's useful', look upthread for that. I agree with it, though. Effective torso armor is much better than nothing, but if your limbs aren't protected you're going to get dropped, it'll just take a little longer.

[Verjigorm]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

HEMP is a waste against fully-covered light infantry, but it still works, and works very well.

Whereas if you've got 7mm, and you meet a Heavy Powersuit in a dark alley, you can't hurt it.

Until use a 25mm detachable GL with a 6dx3(10) HEMP grenade. That's not going to scratch the heavy battlesuit's armor, it's going to blow a hole straight through it. 10mm HEMP is an anemic option for almost everything that can fire it. For pistols, it's an upgrade. For Storm Carbines? It's a downgrade when APEX can bring better firepower, and HEMP makes no use of the wonderful power of ETK.

Use rifles on the squishies and grenades on the hardstuff. Makes more sense than using HEMP on squishies, with the hope that it can deal a few points of damage(Seriously, 10mm HEMP is only going to do about 3 damage to the torso of a Heavy Battlesuit...). Use the correct weapon for the correct role. If battlesuits are dime a dozen and everybody fights in them, then we upgrade this to use bigger weapons, like the 15mm chaingun, 25mm auto cannons or missile launchers.

The Storm Carbine and Storm rifle arn't bad options if you're a small elite group with amazing accuracy and fire discipline. If you are equipping divisions of troops though? It's a bad weapon.

You also fail to acknowledge that HEMP will cause a great deal of collateral daage.

Yeah, my point is they don't worry about getting shot by somebody taking a ridiculous trick shot when they could just push a button on their gun and not need to bother.

Acc 7 vs a SM1 battlesuit: no penalty to target chinks in armor on torso. Good scope, +6 Acc, targetting program +2 to attack rolls. That's an accurate trick shot in 50yds, which is well within CQB limits. But I

Or you could carry an IML, MLAWS, or TML. Or a 15mm AMR. Or a 25mm payload rifle. Probably other weapons I'm not thinking of.

You *could*. But none of those mentioned weapons are practical for an augmented soldier. 32lbs gets you 225rnds and the Railgun, or an AMR with 20rnds or a TML with 14 missiles. There's nothing comparable in the weightclass, other than the ETK Storm rifle and Storm Carbine. They don't have the ability to be used in a long-term, constant engagement: you'll run out of ammo too damn fast.

If you want to take have a "squad designated marksman", the 10mm railgun is perfect for the task. The 10mm Storm Carbine is comparable, though less accurate and shorter-ranged.

Battlesuits can be killed by some infantry weapons. But then, so can actual tanks. Armor doesn't have to be impervious to infantry weapons to qualify. Otherwise there haven't been any tanks since the 70s. If your enemy uses the weapon mix you're recommending, heavy power armor, like real armor, is impervious to their primary weapons and requires special weapons to counter.
But the armor that allowed them to meet an enemy and simply not be threatened was their original and defining feature. Certainly it didn't take long for people to have weapons that could threaten them, but if the AT doesn't stop the tank for whatever reason, the squishy types with rifles are in for a bad day.

The original defining feature of tanks was an ability to cross a muddy no-man's land, crush machine gun nests and barbed war, and cross trenches. They were somewhat lackluster in this regard. Battlesuits, if used for a direct attack against an enemy equipped with any sort of heavy weaponry(such as the AMR, Railgun, MLAWS, TML, Payload Rifle, etc) is going to be annihilated when it starts.

Battlesuits don't really have that much in the way of improved antivehicle capability over infantry. Infantry have access to personal railguns, AMRs, and rockets. The battlesuit can carry more weapons, or can occasionally carry automatic versions of things that were semi-auto normally, but the difference is that the battlesuit puts three holes in the vehicle while the unpowered infantry puts just one, not that the battlesuit can kill things foot soldiers can't touch.

Weapons like the 15mm chaingun are not man portable nor usable by men. Neither is the 25mm autocannon. Both are great against vehicles, battlesuits and other, hard, targets. The TML is too heavy to make a reliable man-portable weapon, the MLAWs is also similarly handicapped. The Gauss Mortar(with its 18d pi++ that can easily be an APEX shell and blow you to hell) is also not manportable.

The M2HB and Saco mk19 are also not portable, and are the sort of weapon a low-tech battlesuit could use!

Uh, why on earth not? It sounds like using at least some APEP would be in keeping with exactly the same philosophy that would lead to you using Battlesuits: it's worth throwing money at force-multipliers. Though a battlesuit-heavy force is much less likely to actually use lots of APEP, because the big guns they'll be carrying don't need it as often.

Except that APEP is in ordinately expensive for the returns. 25,000 rounds of 10mm APEP will buy you a base-line Heavy Battle-suit. 25,000 rounds is a pretty conservative expenditure of ammunition for a kill, and that's a lot of money to be thrown down range. In comparison, 833,333 rounds of 7mm will pay for a Heavy Battlesuit.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I'm saying that you and your buddies spray him with fire (taking random hit locations) and he's got to respect it. It won't kill him in one hit, but if he doesn't take the hint and get suppressed it will do the job.

If you want enough gun to actually have something like a fair shot one-on-one against a heavy powersuit trooper, well, that's the reason people talk about the ETK storm carbine with APEP. Or at the very least, the ETK assault carbine firing APEP on boost. But we're too cheap to issue APEP for these occasions, aren't we?

That's not really supression though. Supression is not when the guy can stand up and go "Wow, a couple more seconds of this and I might have a problem" while mowing your guys down. Supression is supposed to result in "Oh no! Take cover now!."

Suppression fire is an All-Out Attack, so your guys firing suppression fire on the alleyway where Heavy is hiding, and he can just step out, make a couple of dodges, take a couple of hits, and then spray his own return fire against the lot of them with his mini-gun or HMG. They can't dodge OR take the hits, so they're all very much dead. And then he walks over to clever ol' you, and shoots you (Incidentally, this is pretty much the designed purpose of a battlesuit: to break suppression).

Look, I'm not saying it can't possibly work, but "This is why the 10mm > 7mm," I just don't buy it. Neither will really do much against a guy in power armor.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

No, because you don't need to make called shots to hit limbs. You've got a decent probability of hitting something other than the heavily shielded locations with any stray round. In fact, a lot of your shots are going to be suppressive so you can't pick your hit locations.

Also, I'm hardly the one who introduced 'it penetrates limbs, thus it's useful', look upthread for that. I agree with it, though. Effective torso armor is much better than nothing, but if your limbs aren't protected you're going to get dropped, it'll just take a little longer.

This is a last-ditch strategy at best. This is not an indication that a 10mm round is "useful" against a Battlesuit. When you suddenly meet this guy, you're hoping A) that his EMA has run out, B) that your random spray of bullets will hit something other than his well-protected torso (A 50/50 proposition), and C) that he won't manage to kill you after you cripple (assuming the damage dice don't wuss out on you) a non-critical hit location like a leg or an arm (you can still fire your gun after falling down, and you can still wield a two handed weapon with one hand, it just becomes unready after every use, and power armor often has sufficient strength to ignore that requirement entirely).

I suppose that, strictly speaking, is better than a 7mm round, but that's like saying musket shot is better against power armor than an arrow.

[Allu]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Suppression fire is an All-Out Attack, so your guys firing suppression fire on the alleyway where Heavy is hiding, and he can just step out, make a couple of dodges, take a couple of hits, and then spray his own return fire against the lot of them with his mini-gun or HMG. They can't dodge OR take the hits, so they're all very much dead. And then he walks over to clever ol' you, and shoots you (Incidentally, this is pretty much the designed purpose of a battlesuit: to break suppression).

If you make an All-Out Attack from a position where your opponent can hit you without even taking a turn to aim and you aren't sure if it'll drop him then you deserve to get pasted. Use cover.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Allu

If you make an All-Out Attack from a position where your opponent can hit you without even taking a turn to aim and you aren't sure if it'll drop him then you deserve to get pasted. Use cover.

You can't use cover while All-Out Attacking. At best, you can lean down behind a wall a little, but most of your torso and all of your arms and head needs to be exposed. In CBQ against someone with a heavy automatic weapon and the sorts of equipment that a guy in power armor can carry (like a computer, good for +2 to hit, and Tactical Radar, good for +3 to hit), and it shouldn't be too much of a problem to take you down.

The point of suppressive fire is to suppress. You AoA, which leaves you vulnerable but that's ok because nobody is going to be firing back because as soon as they pop up, you get to hit them first. As soon as he shrugs off the fact that you'll hit him first, you have a problem and suppression no longer becomes a valid tactic, and you have to resort to pop-up attacks and dodges.

Battlesuits are ideal for beating suppression, and the fact that you're arming your guys with 10mm HEMP rounds won't change that.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

You can't use cover while All-Out Attacking. At best, you can lean down behind a wall a little, but most of your torso and all of your arms and head needs to be exposed.

Why?

All-Out Attack with a gun is no different from any other attack with a gun. You don't have to expose yourself any more with AoA than with a regular Attack.

You can use AoA while firing from a murder hole or down a trench behind some sandbags.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

Until use a 25mm detachable GL with a 6dx3(10) HEMP grenade. That's not going to scratch the heavy battlesuit's armor, it's going to blow a hole straight through it. 10mm HEMP is an anemic option for almost everything that can fire it. For pistols, it's an upgrade. For Storm Carbines? It's a downgrade when APEX can bring better firepower, and HEMP makes no use of the wonderful power of ETK.

Wasting the potential of ETK is too bad, but boosted ETK shots still won't get you 40d penetration unless you're using APEP. How does AP(H?)EX beat that?

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

Use rifles on the squishies and grenades on the hardstuff. Makes more sense than using HEMP on squishies, with the hope that it can deal a few points of damage(Seriously, 10mm HEMP is only going to do about 3 damage to the torso of a Heavy Battlesuit...). Use the correct weapon for the correct role. If battlesuits are dime a dozen and everybody fights in them, then we upgrade this to use bigger weapons, like the 15mm chaingun, 25mm auto cannons or missile launchers.

Grenades are just not that good against power armor. They'll work if they hit, but the very low volume of fire and limited accuracy means that that stopping power doesn't add up to actually stopping the target.

10mm HEMP will do about 0 damage to the torso of a heavy battlesuit, but it'll cripple a limb pretty well. Once the EMA is down.

And while I'm a fan of the 15mm chaingun, if you're worried about ammo budgets making your standard longarm spray $4 base cost rounds may not be ideal. I think there's a fairly decent 10mm EM HMG for the cost-conscious.

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

The Storm Carbine and Storm rifle arn't bad options if you're a small elite group with amazing accuracy and fire discipline. If you are equipping divisions of troops though? It's a bad weapon.

I'm still unconvinced that I want my riflemen running around with no teeth if the heavy suit shows up. Ubiquitous grenade launchers might be close enough to effective to substitute, though.

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

You also fail to acknowledge that HEMP will cause a great deal of collateral daage.

I can't really see that being a concern in context. You've got powersuits re-arranging the terrain, showers of UGL fire, mortar boxes, missile launchers, and probably some joker with a laser. Are exploding bullets going to suddenly take you over the limit on collateral damage?

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

Acc 7 vs a SM1 battlesuit: no penalty to target chinks in armor on torso. Good scope, +6 Acc, targetting program +2 to attack rolls. That's an accurate trick shot in 50yds, which is well within CQB limits.

Aiming for 3 seconds before shooting doesn't really strike me as practical in CQB conditions.

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

You *could*. But none of those mentioned weapons are practical for an augmented soldier. 32lbs gets you 225rnds and the Railgun, or an AMR with 20rnds or a TML with 14 missiles. There's nothing comparable in the weightclass, other than the ETK Storm rifle and Storm Carbine. They don't have the ability to be used in a long-term, constant engagement: you'll run out of ammo too damn fast.

If the railgun is really useful for plinking away at targets way below its weight class, that's a good point. It seems to me that if you're not shooting at a special hard target, you're going to wish you weren't using that big slow-firing thing.

Also, where's the IML in that figuring? It's a very capable support/secondary weapon.

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

If you want to take have a "squad designated marksman", the 10mm railgun is perfect for the task. The 10mm Storm Carbine is comparable, though less accurate and shorter-ranged.

The storm carbine's a pretty poor squad marksman weapon, I'd say. The storm rifle is a fairer comparison, but it's not really good either. I'd agree that, if 20lb is an ok rifle weight for you (and 30 isn't, which is plausible) the railgun is probably the best marksman's rifle available. Unless you're willing to take a dinosaur laser, which isn't much good for punching power armor but certainly is accurate.

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

The original defining feature of tanks was an ability to cross a muddy no-man's land, crush machine gun nests and barbed war, and cross trenches. They were somewhat lackluster in this regard. Battlesuits, if used for a direct attack against an enemy equipped with any sort of heavy weaponry(such as the AMR, Railgun, MLAWS, TML, Payload Rifle, etc) is going to be annihilated when it starts.

So will a tank that casually drives out in front of an enemy equipped with any sort of heavy weaponry. Being fancy armor-that-also-does-what-infantry-does doesn't give you an exemption from tactics.

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

Weapons like the 15mm chaingun are not man portable nor usable by men. Neither is the 25mm autocannon. Both are great against vehicles, battlesuits and other, hard, targets. The TML is too heavy to make a reliable man-portable weapon, the MLAWs is also similarly handicapped. The Gauss Mortar(with its 18d pi++ that can easily be an APEX shell and blow you to hell) is also not manportable.

The M2HB and Saco mk19 are also not portable, and are the sort of weapon a low-tech battlesuit could use!

Right, but those are respectively automatic versions of the AMR and the payload rifle. I'd agree that they're far superior to their semiautomatic kin against battlesuits, which have a tendency to dodge and take cover, but against vehicles? Better but not game-changing. And against unpowered troops LMGs provide much the same capability in a man-portable package.

The TML is man-portable, just highly inconvenient. Powersuits are more likely to get you one where you need it, though. The MLAWS might not be manportable, but it's just an effectively pump-action version of the IML.

Haven't looked into light artillery. You may have a point there.

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

Except that APEP is in ordinately expensive for the returns. 25,000 rounds of 10mm APEP will buy you a base-line Heavy Battle-suit. 25,000 rounds is a pretty conservative expenditure of ammunition for a kill, and that's a lot of money to be thrown down range. In comparison, 833,333 rounds of 7mm will pay for a Heavy Battlesuit.

25,000 rounds of special battlesuit-killing ammo per kill? APEP is not for beating the bushes just in case. Not unless you can afford to really pour money out that way. APEP is for loading when you need it.

Originally Posted by Mailanka

This is a last-ditch strategy at best. This is not an indication that a 10mm round is "useful" against a Battlesuit. When you suddenly meet this guy, you're hoping A) that his EMA has run out, B) that your random spray of bullets will hit something other than his well-protected torso (A 50/50 proposition), and C) that he won't manage to kill you after you cripple (assuming the damage dice don't wuss out on you) a non-critical hit location like a leg or an arm (you can still fire your gun after falling down, and you can still wield a two handed weapon with one hand, it just becomes unready after every use, and power armor often has sufficient strength to ignore that requirement entirely).

I suppose that, strictly speaking, is better than a 7mm round, but that's like saying musket shot is better against power armor than an arrow.

There are only two non-last-ditch strategies for an unscheduled encounter with a heavy battlesuit. APEP, or being in power armor yourself.

If you're a bunch of squishies whose boss didn't provide APEP magazines, a sudden close encounter with a powersuit is likely to make you wish you had just encountered a tank instead.

However, I don't think it's as bad as you make it out to be. There should be more than one of you. You do need to accumulate at least 11 hits, but the first 10 can be anywhere. And honestly, battlesuit-guy is pretty likely to stop kicking after you blow one of his limbs half-off, even if in theory he could keep shooting.

I have to say, though, I'm coming to think the assault carbine has a lot more going for it than I'd realized. Just make sure you have some APEP around for big game hunting.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Icelander

By those rules, it is harder (by -2) to conceal even the best design of concealable vest with a 5" by 8" trauma plate under full Carmelite habit* than it is to conceal Vulcan autocannon while naked*.

That's a clear Murphy, "In GURPS a Carmilite Nun in full habit has a harder time concealing a SAPI plate, then a naked man has with a Vulcan Autocannon". It looks like that might be errata.

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Banned..? Suing..?

Details?

Since other people seem to find the debate "wearying" I won't go into details, but you should be able to find most of the answers from the news story that Shawn linked, and the wiki page.

Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon

I had a much harder time finding the actual thickness of the Interceptor body armor, but it appears to be about two inches.

Roughly with SAPIs, yes. Without SAPIs the OTV is about half an inch thick, the MTV is a little thicker in areas (especially the stomach). The SAPIs are just about an inch thick.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Most of the trauma plates in HT should be [semi-ablative] too and this is mentioned in flavor text but isn't implemented in the stat tables, probably for the sake of simplicity.

SAPI plates need to be replaced after they've sustained hits, they can usually sustain multiple hits in the same engagement though. Dragon Skin wasn't made (AFAICT) to be easily replaceable in the field, as it's supposed to not need to be.

Originally Posted by Verjigorm

Honestly, I doubt that the average infantryman will be running around in a battlesuit. At $90-200k a suit, barring the bells and whistles, the cost is prohibitive for wide scale issue. It's more likely that TacSuits /w clamshells will be the most common defensive armament for infantry.

Or the average infantry "man" is a robot...

Originally Posted by Mailanka

That's not really supression though. Supression is not when the guy can stand up and go "Wow, a couple more seconds of this and I might have a problem" while mowing your guys down. Supression is supposed to result in "Oh no! Take cover now!."

Suppression fire by GURPS RAW doesn't really do this however. A number crunching player can easily see that his odds of being hit and not dodging are actually quite low, and can therefore generally ignore suppression.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

That's a clear Murphy, "In GURPS a Carmilite Nun in full habit has a harder time concealing a SAPI plate, then a naked man has with a Vulcan Autocannon". It looks like that might be errata.

Unfortunately, it isn't something that can be fixed with change to a sentence or two. High-Tech should have included comprehensive rules for this that made sense and were scalable to things that exist in the real world.

It didn't. It included nonsensical rules for this that the playtesters appear to have missed.

GURPS Tactical Shooting was slightly off-topic for a fix, but perhaps GURPS Modern Firepower will include one.