Shields

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Hellboy

Not sure how to price this concept though.

It's called Semi-Ablative, and is a -20% Limitation on the DR Advantage. See B47. There's been some talk in the past about trying to make a progression between Ablative (every point blocked removes 1 DR) and Semi-Ablative (every 10 points blocked removes 1 DR), but I don't think there was ever anything official. It would probably be fair to follow a scheme of +10% per +1 SSR, however - -80% for 1:1, -70% for 1.5:1 (every 1.5 points blocked removes 1 DR), -60% for 2:1, -50% for 3:1, -40% for 5:1, -30% for 7:1, -20% for 10:1, and -10% for 15:1. I'd probably allow for -5% for 20:1, but anything beyond that doesn't count as a Limitation.

In terms of gear, Vehicles (for 3e) suggests ablative armor (which is semi-ablative) being something like 3xDR of Laminate (otherwise the best armor) at a tiny fraction (something like 5% per pound) of the cost. For my Vehicles<->Spaceships conversion houserules, I felt a simple +1 SSR to DR (70 becomes 100) and 1/10th the price was more fair*. The armor design articles from Pyramid also have some options for ablative armor that could be exported to Spaceships fairly readily (although those are basically a small price decrease for no improvement in DR).

*3xDR means you're protected from a lot more, but have the risk of things that couldn't hurt you before now being able to. Assuming base DR 100 and a worse-case scenario of an attack that always does exactly 100 damage, the semi-ablative DR 300 has to be hit 22 times with that attack for you to get wounded. That might be a fair trade if they were the same cost, but at 5% of the price it's really hard to justify not using semi-ablative armor pretty much everywhere.