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Old 10-22-2021, 11:02 PM   #21
GURPS Fox
 
Join Date: Jun 2020
Default Re: Crew and Passenger positions and suits/powered armor

To go back to the topic at hand, so should I simply use Varyon's suggestion or go with the Spaceships model where SM+1 has a volume modifier of 3?
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Old 10-23-2021, 07:04 AM   #22
Fred Brackin
 
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Default Re: Crew and Passenger positions and suits/powered armor

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Originally Posted by GURPS Fox View Post
To go back to the topic at hand, so should I simply use Varyon's suggestion or go with the Spaceships model where SM+1 has a volume modifier of 3?
Technically Spaceships has a mass modifer of x3 per +1. It doesn't figure volume at all. A sort of assumption that volume increases in direct proportion to mass may be present.
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Old 10-23-2021, 12:03 PM   #23
GURPS Fox
 
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Default Re: Crew and Passenger positions and suits/powered armor

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Technically Spaceships has a mass modifer of x3 per +1. It doesn't figure volume at all. A sort of assumption that volume increases in direct proportion to mass may be present.
Good to know. This is a lot harder than it looks...
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Old 10-25-2021, 10:28 AM   #24
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Default Re: Crew and Passenger positions and suits/powered armor

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Technically Spaceships has a mass modifer of x3 per +1. It doesn't figure volume at all. A sort of assumption that volume increases in direct proportion to mass may be present.
"Alternate Spaceships" (Pyramid #3/34) does make some concessions to volume, with its Armor and Volume rules. Briefly, for those unfamiliar with it, having a lot of armor (which is much more dense than normal Spaceships systems) makes the vessel physically smaller in volume. Initially, this basically just serves as a DR multiplier (less surface area to cover means a given mass of armor will be thicker, thus granting more DR), but with a really high mass-fraction being armor, you actually see a reduction in SM (and I think something that's 95% armor is -2 to SM)

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Originally Posted by GURPS Fox View Post
Good to know. This is a lot harder than it looks...
Arguably, the easiest way to handle it is to basically just ignore it - "Thanks to a combination of the tight confines and the necessity of wearing a suit of powered armor, crew stations are incredibly cramped; fortunately, modern crews have trained well enough to make do." If that doesn't work for you, just figure out (roughly) how much you want your armor to increase volume, and use that. Assume normal crew stations are roughly sized for someone 6 feet tall (I know when my brother joined the USMC a couple decades ago, they noted he was exactly 6 feet tall, and said he was lucky because pretty much all of the basic gear was made with that size soldier in mind). If the powered armor makes you 7 feet tall, that's ~x1.17 to height; if all dimensions increase proportionally, cube that height increase, for ~x1.6 to volume. If you envision powered armor being bulkier than normal human proportions (which is fairly common in depictions of it), consider a bit more of a boost to account for that - above, that might be x1.7 to volume instead. If you want something mathematical, consider instead of cubing the height increase, raise it to the 3.5 power - which is ~x1.7 volume, above.

If you have no idea how much you want powered armor to increase height/volume, you could apply the above to the powered armor entries from GURPS Ultra Tech, which I believe gives heights. Alternatively, if you're a glutton for complexity, consider making use of this. Note the early part of that is basically me going through my thought process, justification, and math; if you want to skip to the meat, go to the Implementation section (via Ctrl+F). Note my volume constraints were largely arbitrary, but IIRC they ended up matching fairly well with the versions from UT. They're also more about surface area than volume; to determine the increase to the latter, raise the former to the 3/2 power. That is, if you're looking at a suit that it says is +15% (x1.15) to armor weight, cube 1.15 and take the square root of the result - 1.15^(3/2)=1.23 - to determine the effect on volume; in this case, x1.23.
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Last edited by Varyon; 10-25-2021 at 10:34 AM.
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Old 10-25-2021, 06:55 PM   #25
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Default Re: Crew and Passenger positions and suits/powered armor

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Eh, not really. Even ignoring other methods of keeping troops in line, people are willing to go up against high-caliber weapons without any armor to speak of. I mean, you had completely-unarmored irregulars going up against modern tanks in the middle east, and a hit even from one of the anti-personnel machine guns on one of those things would be a near-guaranteed fatal hit. They also went up against Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and the Bushmasters mounted to those are far more vicious than what you're describing (albeit with perhaps lower RoF).
For most soldiers in the 20th century their 'armour' was a steel helmet and a woollen (or cotton or linen) uniform and some leather boots. They faced weapons that are just about as dangerous to an unarmoured human - past about 6d it really doesn't much matter how much damage a gun does until it hits ~18d (auto-kill on torso hits) - a hit will be putting you down and into hospital or dead anyway. On top of that there was the major killer - artillery, and it did far more damage on a solid hit/near-miss.

Soldiers in the 20th century weren't known for mutinying for lack of effective body armour.
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