closest Space/Ultratech equiv to the giant power armors used by Marines in Starcraft?

[Tyneras]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I've long felt that a decent idea for a certain type of ablative armor would be to have it with a given DR that roughly follows the normal semi-ablative scheme (optionally a bit faster, say -1 DR per 5 damage), but instead of a penetration damaging the character, it instead degrades the armor on a 1-for-1 basis. So, a character with DR 100 in this scheme, if struck by a 150 damage attack, would have the first 100 reduce DR to 90, and the remaining 50 would reduce DR to 40 (rather than pulping the character). Such a modifier is arguably worth a net -10%* if it's part of the character or a Gadget (if it's just gear, like the armor of most Marines, it doesn't need such stats). This basically means the character won't be harmed at all until the armor - or at least that part of it - is completely destroyed (I should note I initially came up with this while musing on how Shardplate from The Stormlight Archives might function, and also considered a one-shot adventure involving space marines in armor that functions similarly for some players more familiar with "buckets of HP" characters/enemies). This can also work well for superscience shields that won't let anything through until they've been fully depleted.

*Something that comes close in function would be a layer of Semi-ablative DR and an equal layer of Ablative DR. For DR 100, the first layer (with Semi-ablative -20%) would cost [400], while the second (with Ablative -80%) would cost [100], for a total of [500] - essentially a net +0% modifier on the initial DR 100. That would outperform the above, however, as the Semi-ablative layer wouldn't lose DR when the Ablative one does, so I felt roughly halving the cost of the Ablative layer would be appropriate for linking its DR to the Semi-ablative layer's. That changes the cost to [450], or a net -10%.

Interesting concept! If I may, I'd like to call this "Double-Pass Ablative" or DP-Ablative.

In my personal system off allowing any arbitrary value of Ablative, where Ablative is Ablative(1) and Semi-Ablative is Ablative(10) I'd have DP-Ablative be Ablative(X/Y) so your example would be Ablative(10/1). A Fair value for the limitation would, in my opinion, be the full -% of the first pass and half the value of the second pass.