High tech armor vs Ultra-tech armor

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by weby

Except that you can only add a layer of flexible armor not hard armor according to rules:

B286: "but you can only layer armor if the inner layer is both flexible and concealable."

Low Tech modifies the rules to allow for layering armor even if the inner layer is neither flexible nor concealable. The greathelm (which is literally a helmet designed to go over other helmets) is an example, and I think there are mentions of wearing one suit of plate over another for jousting.

As for layering, this strikes me as a "sum of squares" situation. IIRC, in a previous discussion we looked at a "difference of squares" model when it came to armor penetration, particularly of flexible armor, to represent that projectiles that exceed a flexible armor's rating typically suffer minimal loss of energy for punching through such. And what we found there was that you got a decent approximation of the effect without having to bust out a calculator by simply dividing DR by 3 (or 3.5, if using Armor as Dice) if it was penetrated (so a 30 damage shot through flexible DR 20 would still have around 23 damage, as that DR 20 gets divided by 3 and becomes 6.67). This understated the effectiveness of the armor for attacks that just barely got through, and overstated it for those that blew right through it, but largely worked (I think the former was handled by requiring damage to exceed DR by some factor - maybe x1.5 - before the divisor came into play; the latter really didn't need correction - sure, maybe it would be more accurate for your DR 30 armor to drop to DR 1 instead of DR 10 against a 100 damage attack, but the difference between 90 penetrating damage and 99 penetrating damage is sufficiently small as to not be worth the hassle). So, for layered armor, simply dividing the DR provided by every layer beyond the first by 3 (or 3.5) might give a decent approximation of the effectiveness without requiring a lot of calculation.