should there actually be "indestructible" weapons?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Plane

I guess in theory even if an object had either infinite HP or infinite DR (since cover DR is calculated using both) it wouldn't provide cover to a cosmic "ignores DR" attack that lacked cosmic:defensive

A force blade doesn't have infinite DR or infinite HP (in fact, it has 0 hp). It's just not actually an object and doesn't get damaged by its DR being exceeded.

[Joseph Paul]

Originally Posted by Anthony

A force blade doesn't have infinite DR or infinite HP (in fact, it has 0 hp). It's just not actually an object and doesn't get damaged by its DR being exceeded.

Just what DR does the blade have?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

Just what DR does the blade have?

Like most weapons, unspecified. Unbreakable for weapons really just means it doesn't use the rules for weapon breakage, which are based on weight.

[Joseph Paul]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Indestructible does not mean impenetrable, it just means that if an attack passed through the barrier, the barrier would still be intact afterward.

Is there any reason to believe that this behaviour is what the authors meant when they wrote the description of the Force Sword?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

Is there any reason to believe that this behaviour is what the authors meant when they wrote the description of the Force Sword?

There's no reason to think the authors were thinking about much more than "adequate to parry personal other personal scale weapons". GURPS has never actually thought about weapons in terms of HP and DR.

[Joseph Paul]

Originally Posted by Anthony

There's no reason to think the authors were thinking about much more than "adequate to parry personal other personal scale weapons". GURPS has never actually thought about weapons in terms of HP and DR.

The authors provided the means to figure HP and DR for any object and weapons are objects. They are not devoid of those stats, the authors chose to use a more dynamic and player friendly means to deal with breaking them in combat. There is no evidence that they meant for the blade to be penetrable and without DR there is no threshold to make that decision so your premise for this has hit a rocky shoal.

And what is wrong with being 'unbreakable'?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

The authors provided the means to figure HP and DR for any object and weapons are objects. They are not devoid of those stats, the authors chose to use a more dynamic and player friendly means to deal with breaking them in combat.

Just for the record, the weapon breakage rules are far older than 4e HP formulas. I think they might go back before 3e.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

The authors provided the means to figure HP and DR for any object and weapons are objects. They are not devoid of those stats, the authors chose to use a more dynamic and player friendly means to deal with breaking them in combat. There is no evidence that they meant for the blade to be penetrable and without DR there is no threshold to make that decision so your premise for this has hit a rocky shoal.

And what is wrong with being 'unbreakable'?

There is no defined way of computing the DR of an arbitrary object (most weapons lack listed DR), and since a force blade is weight zero, it has zero hp (the projector has weight and hit points, but the blade does not).

The weapon breakage rules are legacy rules that I suspect date back to Man to Man, though I don't have the references to check, and they don't actually make any sense with the rest of the game system. Incidentally, prior to 4th edition all very fine weapons were 'unbreakable', and force blades are something that pretty much just got carried forward from prior editions.

[Joseph Paul]

Originally Posted by Anthony

There is no defined way of computing the DR of an arbitrary object (most weapons lack listed DR), and since a force blade is weight zero, it has zero hp (the projector has weight and hit points, but the blade does not).

The weapon breakage rules are legacy rules that I suspect date back to Man to Man, though I don't have the references to check, and they don't actually make any sense with the rest of the game system. Incidentally, prior to 4th edition all very fine weapons were 'unbreakable', and force blades are something that pretty much just got carried forward from prior editions.

BS p401 -Striking at Weapons... Breaking a weapon... See Damage to Objects (p483). A weapon's weight and composition will determine it's DR and HP.

So, not so much on the GURPS never used DR and HP for weapons. It has been there in 4E all along. Most people don't want to track it I suspect.

Breaking a parrying weapon rules come into play when one weapon is significantly heavier than the other. Weapons that are within three times the weight of each other don't suffer any deleterious effects when used to parry an attack.

The Force Sword is what is completely different here as it always inflicts damage on another weapon for which we would need DR and HP....

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Anthony

A force blade doesn't have infinite DR or infinite HP (in fact, it has 0 hp). It's just not actually an object and doesn't get damaged by its DR being exceeded.

Should something even exist in GURPS terms if it's maximum HP is 0?

I could see assigning fractional HP for low-mass objects like house flies and mosquitos but not 0.

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

There is no evidence that they meant for the blade to be penetrable and without DR there is no threshold to make that decision so your premise for this has hit a rocky shoal.

Even a million DR can be penetrated by ignores DR unless the DR is cosmic or hardened.

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

And what is wrong with being 'unbreakable'?

I have no problem with this long as we don't confuse it w/ undestroyable.

B376's "break" when compared to B401's "Breaking a Weapon" which cites B483's "Damage to Objects" which mentions "Homogenous objects, such as
swords, bend or break, but might remain partially usable" on the same tier as merely a "severe malfunction" on the level of falling unconscious for living beings.

B484's roll at -1xHP on the other hand is more like destruction: "a sword
might shatter instead of merely bending or snapping" which is the "destroy" equivalent to 'death' for the living.

I'm thinking B376 is more like B483's result than B484's result.

Originally Posted by Anthony

There is no defined way of computing the DR of an arbitrary object (most weapons lack listed DR), and since a force blade is weight zero, it has zero hp (the projector has weight and hit points, but the blade does not).

One could argue that there is some negligible form of mass (as energy has) in the blade per E=MC2.

Does this mean batteries get slightly lighter when you use up their stored energy, I wonder? I figure on some low-perception per https://physics.stackexchange.com/qu...ged-discharged

So the amount of mass the force sword's battery loses when drained divided by the time that mass keeps the sword up could probably give you some sort of "mass existing in the sword in a given second" maybe?

This doesn't work well w/ continuous math but more in a discrete kind, like "mass expected which creates a sword for a 1-second period, then requires more mass from battery to create another 1-second period".