should there actually be "indestructible" weapons?

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

If I pay points for an Innate Attack I certainly expect it to function as I bought it and that it is not able to be taken from me, suppressed or broken with out a commiserate outlay of points by my opponent(s) for the ability to do so.

or if you got some kinda gadget discount

I guess just looking for gadget complexity like the diff between "I wear a SM-4 backpack with 10 HP which allows me to create an indestructible Melee-Cutting weapon" vs "I'm carring an SM-4 sword with 10 HP which does a melee-cutting"

[Joseph Paul]

Originally Posted by Plane

or if you got some kinda gadget discount

I guess just looking for gadget complexity like the diff between "I wear a SM-4 backpack with 10 HP which allows me to create an indestructible Melee-Cutting weapon" vs "I'm carring an SM-4 sword with 10 HP which does a melee-cutting"

What do you think is unfair about the indestructible force field of the Force sword as presented in Basic and UT? How do you see it unbalancing things in a game?

[Aldric]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

What do you think is unfair about the indestructible force field of the Force sword as presented in Basic and UT? How do you see it unbalancing things in a game?

Clever players will always find a way to throw a wrench in your works.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Aldric

Clever players will always find a way to throw a wrench in your works.

In theory, you could create an impenetrable barrier by taking a bunch of force swords and arranging them into such, with each having its hilt behind the beams of other ones. Particularly if you make the beam thinner than the projector (I suggested something pencil-thick upthread), this is going to be difficult to arrange, but a player with enough time on their hands might come up with such an arrangement. You'd also need to have some way to secure the hilts, as otherwise as soon as something hits one of the blades, its hilt will get shifted into one of the blades protecting it (destroying the hilt), and indeed I suspect any arrangement that allowed this would be complex enough that hitting it anywhere would basically cause all the blades to shift (as they each strike each other), causing the whole thing to fall apart.

I actually considered something like this as a problem when thinking up the KN blades (force swords) of my Harpyias setting. Initially, my solution was that having them densely packed together meant any disruption of one (say, from deflecting a blaster bolt) would cause the others to get disrupted as well, and this would actually cause a cascade that rendered the whole thing increasingly unstable until one of more of the blades suffered a catastrophic failure (the emitter exploding), which could in turn result in further such failures, destroying the "shield" at a minimum and likely severely damaging whatever it was meant to protect. Thanks in part to this thread, I've instead decided that the nebulous shields used to protect vehicles and the KN blades are actually variations on the same technology (I always intended the blades to be destructible, in no small part because that's part of what makes the color choices different, although I haven't yet decided how I want this to work; probably something based on "The Broken Blade").

[Joseph Paul]

Originally Posted by Aldric

Clever players will always find a way to throw a wrench in your works.

That does not answer the question I asked.

Clever players therefore do not need an unbreakable blade to throw a wrench in things. So what is unfair about having such an item in a game?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Aldric

Clever players will always find a way to throw a wrench in your works.

I do not believe any player is clever enough to exploit the distinction between "indestructible" and "indestructible by any available power but theoretically destroyable by Zeus."

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

I do not believe any player is clever enough to exploit the distinction between "indestructible" and "indestructible by any available power" but theoretically destroyable by Zeus.

I suppose it depends on if you're throwing your characters up against Zeus. Admit it - Kratos with a lightsaber (red, obviously) would have been awesome.

More seriously, yeah, indestructible vs nearly-indestructible is generally a purely academic distinction.

[Joseph Paul]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I suppose it depends on if you're throwing your characters up against Zeus. Admit it - Kratos with a lightsaber (red, obviously) would have been awesome.

More seriously, yeah, indestructible vs nearly-indestructible is generally a purely academic distinction.

"indestructable" only applies for as long as the emmiter is whole, the switch is on, and there is still juice in the battery. This seems to me to be a non-issue.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Varyon

In theory, you could create an impenetrable barrier by taking a bunch of force swords and arranging them into such

Indestructible does not mean impenetrable, it just means that if an attack passed through the barrier, the barrier would still be intact afterward.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

"indestructable" only applies for as long as the emmiter is whole, the switch is on, and there is still juice in the battery. This seems to me to be a non-issue.

You could arrange it so that the blade of the 2nd sword provides cover in front of the handle of the first sword. Or just design it so they're all pointing lengthwise (handle is behind blade) and you rely on the diameter of the force sword to create a surface area of blockage.

Originally Posted by Anthony

Indestructible does not mean impenetrable, it just means that if an attack passed through the barrier, the barrier would still be intact afterward.

I guess in theory even if an object had either infinite HP or infinite DR (since cover DR is calculated using both) it wouldn't provide cover to a cosmic "ignores DR" attack that lacked cosmic:defensive

Though I've never liked ignores DR being cosmic since that's already the highest tier of Armor Divisor