should there actually be "indestructible" weapons?

[Plane]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

if there are no hand weapons that do enough damage to break the energy field
and the heavier weapons are going to be effectively area effect the hilt will go before the energy field.

There's always the hypothetical tight-beam burning that snipes the blade by some deific allfather

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

Allies aren't built with the gadget rules.
Also indestructible doesn't mean impenetrable.
An indestructible gadget won't give you any DR you didn't pay for
(although it can be used for Blocks and Parries if it's conceptualized as Captain America's shield or Excalibur)

But if you have "excalibur" as "a sword gadget that gives me the power of Healing" you should probably also have to pay for an actual Innate Attack to represent that.

Also it seems strange to say "this has DR and HP to be destroyed but that DR and HP doesn't function as cover" which is why I figure you could buy the object as an ally, and the DR-based 'can be destroyed' limitation linked to it is a factor of "how hard it is to deprive me of my advantage"

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

You can't use it as cover without buying the effects of cover.
Otherwise attacks just shoot past it, or it heals all damage right after or something

It's just weird to think of.

"I have an SM 0 gadget the size of me, attacks can hit it, but it can't provide cover". How's that even work, treat attacks as having "ignores DR but only for purpose of cover DR to things behind it" ?

Originally Posted by Varyon

Damage Resistance cannot be reduced except for by corrosion attacks, and I'm pretty certain an application of Cosmic, Added Utility +50% will get rid of that.

Couldn't you just take added utility or defensive on Corrosive Attack as a countermeasure?

Anyway DR itself isn't necessarily a structure but it's applied to a structure w/ HP to make that HP harder to lessen.

The most straightforward way to make DR immune to corrosive attack seems like "Bane: Corrosion" in which case it doesn't stop the damage so the damage can't reduce the DR because they don't interact.

Sort of like if you have DR (crushing only, ablative) it doesn't subtract from burning damage, but burning doesn't ablate it.

Unless I'm understanding wrong and ablative DR does get reduced by damage it doesn't lessen. We ever get any calls on that?

Originally Posted by Varyon

The last level of increased resilience for Natural Weapons is Indestructible. Injury Tolerance: Unbreakable Bones is a thing, as is Unkillable 2 (where you are described as leaving behind an indestructible skeleton or similar).

Given the skeleton doesn't represent any actual HP or utility I think it's a visual effect only.

It could just as easily be "I collapse into just a mask" like that boss from Double Dragon 2.

Originally Posted by Varyon

A melee Innate Attack that is described as a summonable sword (of matter, energy, or whatever) is similarly indestructible (in fact, if you built a force sword as an Ally, the blade part of the force sword would be an Innate Attack, not part of the Ally's body).

Unless of course you defined the blade itself as a separate ally?

The problem with IA (melee) is it could jsut as easily be "I carry a flaming sword" or "a flaming sword briefly appears whenever I do a swinging motion with my hand".

There's no mechanical distinction for "i need to summon it first" AFAIK.

I remember in some past threads I was trying to figure ideas on how to distinguish them, like if you don't have the sword out and need to parry in an emergency you would have to "power dodge" to get it up in time (via all-out defense: double) but if it was already up then you could jsut do a standard parry?

Originally Posted by Varyon

Now, certainly it would make sense for something of sufficient power to overwhelm a force sword - after all, the force fields it's made out of are explicitly destructible (being rapidly-regenerating, semi-ablative DR).

The issue, as others have noted, is that the amount of power you need behind the attack means that the collateral damage from it impacting the force-sword's blade is likely to destroy the hilt anyway (and probably the wielder, for that matter).

Only with wide burning AE stuff not tight-beam burning.

There should probably be some kind of rule like "if I have a 100d tight-beam burning laser it inevitably creates heat in a couple surrounding hexes of whatever it hits" thogh.

Realistic attacks of high dice should probably have some kind of mandatory AE bought on 1% of it's damage or something like that. Not quite a full AE or even explosion/dissipating but something even lesser?

Originally Posted by Varyon

As for breaking it by weight rather than damage, unless the character has godlike ST yet is wielding a force sword made for mere mortals, anything heavy enough to break the force field is going to be too heavy for the character to Parry.

With a standard strength jedi, yeah, though if it's god vs. god type energy sword battles maybe he stands up to it.

At some point though, you have to wonder when kinetic force transfer goes from the force-field around the energy blade into the actual handle.

You do after all use kinetic force to guide the handle itself through the air, and if something stops your sword from moving around you might put more force on that handle to try and keep it moving.

Originally Posted by Varyon

If you really want to know how much force-field DR the force sword's blade represents, here's how I'd do it. Find the smallest device that generates a force screen of an explicitly-described size (one from which you can determine its area - force screens are essentially planar and lack meaningful depth). Divide the weight of the force sword's hilt by the weight of this device, then multiply the DR the device grants by the resulting value. The result here is how much DR the force sword hilt would provide if it generated a force screen the same size as the generator does - but of course a force blade is markedly smaller.

Personally, I envision the "blade" of a force sword as being something like a cylinder that's roughly as wide as a pencil (1/4"). A 1-yard-long cylinder with a radius of 1/8" has a surface area of roughly 28.37 square inches, or roughly 0.2 square feet, or roughly 0.022 square yards. So, divide the actual area by the above, then multiply the calculated DR by this value. Note this assumes the power supply scales with the device. Because you've crossed from the higher-efficiency power cells (size E+ IIRC) for the force screen to the lower-efficiency power cells for the force sword (size C), divide the result by 2. Additionally, if the weight and time of the power supply didn't scale linearly, you need to adjust for this - divide weight of power supply by weight of the hilt/generator in each case, multiply each by how long they last, then divide the result for the hilt by the result for the generator, and finally multiply calculated DR by this value. In other words:

(Weight of hilt)/(Weight of generator)*(Generator DR)*(Force screen area)/(Force blade surface area)*((Hilt power cell weight)*(Hilt time)/(Hilt Weight))/((Generator power cell weight)*(Generator time)/(Generator Weight))/2 = (Force blade DR)

This simplifies to:

[(Generator DR)*(Generator Area)*(Hilt power cell weight)*(Hilt power cell time)]
[2*(Force blade surface area)*(Generator power cell weight)*(Generator time)]

Of course, that tells us how much DR it would have if you made a force sword that functioned as a bludgeon, not one that burns through stuff. You're going to lose some efficiency to burning through things. Additionally, being so small may make the force field generator less efficient (beyond simply being required to use less-efficient power cells). This part I'll leave up to you.

I'll have to look at this later my brain can't handle it this afternoon.

I was sort of thinking the "fp equivalent to joules" that I think was in GURPS Magic under the tech/energy spells.

Originally Posted by whswhs

Physically the answer is simply No. But dramatically we're choosing not to keep track of damage to weapons or shields or other gear because we aren't interested in that level of detail. If we've made that decision the physics is irrelevant; there's no point in discussing it.
If you don't like that, don't allow indestructible gear, and put up with additional complexity, I guess.

I guess it's more like "can we define sensible limits if we wanted some kind of gritty "TL35 future lasers are strong enough to temporarily disrupt your Force Sword blade" type of countermeasure.

As Varyon mentioned the field is likely ablative DR w/ regeneration so it would only be a temporarily disruption.

It does beg the quesiton of what happens to that energy inside during that moment the field is down though.

That would also be a consideration for someone who selectively sabotaged a Force Sword to malfunction.