Pyramid 3/52 - Low-Tech Armor Design - Comments and Questions

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Kallatari

My true question is: why? I'm presuming this had to do with the fact that in a fall or collision the damage is spread across the entire body instead of in a localized area like a weapon's surface.

No, it's mostly an issue of velocity change. If you're moving at 50 mph and you hit a wall, your body has to decelerate to 0 in a very short time. Armor can help by spreading out the force evenly over your entire body, but in the end the body doesn't like several hundred G deceleration no matter what you do.

The explosion issue has more to do with sealed vs non-sealed; explosions should probably treat all non-sealed armor as flexible.

[Kallatari]

Originally Posted by Anthony

No, it's mostly an issue of velocity change. If you're moving at 50 mph and you hit a wall, your body has to decelerate to 0 in a very short time. Armor can help by spreading out the force evenly over your entire body, but in the end the body doesn't like several hundred G deceleration no matter what you do.

The explosion issue has more to do with sealed vs non-sealed; explosions should probably treat all non-sealed armor as flexible.

Isn't that (part of) what an explosion does? It causes you to change velocity because of the force that hits you. Rather than going from 50 mph to 0, you're going from 0 to 50, but the net effect on your body is the same. Or am I way out to lunch on this? (Granted, it probably sends different body parts flying away at different velocities, but that's a whole other level of detail I wasn't planning on going into.)

As to sealed vs non-sealed, that's a refinement to such a house rule I can probably accept. The Bomb Disposal Suit appears to be a non-sealed armor, so I guess that would still allow such a rule to apply. Thanks for that suggestion.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Kallatari

Isn't that (part of) what an explosion does? It causes you to change velocity because of the force that hits you.

Being tossed around can be an issue with explosions, but it's nowhere on the same scale as collisions.

[Kallatari]

Just flagging that I added a couple of new materials in my list of ultra-tech armor materials back on the original post. These materials, which I named Nanoplas Fabric and Replas Fabric, introduce a new Note field:

L : Laser-Ablative. The armor material has an additional plastic coating that absorbs lasers, but is quickly melted away by it. Give the armor x6 DR vs lasers, but the additional DR vs lasers above the base DR value of the armor is semi-ablative.

Also, while I was there, I noticed I made a mistake in my original values. I use a metric system in my games, and I made a stupid mistake when converting kg back to lbs when I posted it, and that had a chain effect on most of the values in the table in my post. So I took the opportunity to fix that as well.

And, just as a sort of designer's note, for the ultra-tech material list I made, I followed the GURPS Spaceships approach that for each subsequent TL, an armor of the same mass provides roughly x1.5 the DR and is roughly x2 the cost.