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Old 01-15-2021, 08:16 AM   #1
Fred Brackin
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default Gurps: The Mandalorian

So, I viewed with the last ep of season 2 about a week ago and have been contemplating various things and how they would fit into Gurps since.

(Spoiler warnings!)

We can start with a biggie:Beskar armor. What is it? It's a thing that looks like a Combat Hardsuit but has not been seen to be penetrated yet. I think the most powerfula ttack we've seen Mando's armor stop so far would be Ahsoka Tano's lightsabres.

We start out with a difficult to prove assumption that a SW "lightsabre" equals a Gurps "Force Sword". I'm sure that it's meant to but have no easy test to prove that it is so at the moment. There's also an assumption that Ahsoka has Weapon Master but I feel this one is not arguable.

So Ahsoka would do 8D+16(5) or 44 pts with a (5) divisor and even Mando's limb armor showed no signs of imminent failure. So it's at least DR 45 with 3 levels of Hardened and quite possibly more. It doesn't stop everything as Mando is seen to react to stopped hits. Perhaps it's an effect of weapons with the "Surge" modifier. They might require a HT roll to avoid being briefly stunned.

TL10 Combat Hardsuits have DR 75/45 so add the Hardened and you can say that beskar is at least that good. Of course, nothing equivalent to regular TL10 Combat Hardsuits has been seen. I can't remembr off hand any scene anywhere in SW visual canon of "armor" stopping or eeven blunting a blaster shot.

Speaking of "armor" we see a new failure mode for Stormtrooper armor. On two occaissions a downed trooper is finished off with a melee weapon attack with the impact point just off camera. Fragments of a shattered Stormtrooper helmet are seen to fly both times.

The first was with the Mandalorian Smith(Shaman?) and her hammer might have been beskar but we have no way of telling if that adds special effects to a blunt weapon. teh second time was Boba Fett with a thing Tusken raiders make out of scrap metal that's probably equal to a Gurps Warhammer.

I'm not sure how much damage over DR is required to shatter a helmet but it certainly doesn't argue for a high DR for the helmet. My best match for StormTrooper armor so far would be a non-flexible version of TL 10 Ablative Nanoplas with DR 6/36.

There was actually a second new failure mode. Trooper armor doesn't protect against flamethrowers either. Mando's wrist-mounted flamethrower doesn't match up well with the Flamers in UT. It's more compact and has a shorter range but probably more damage.

More to come later.
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Old 01-15-2021, 08:23 AM   #2
DemiBenson
 
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Default Re: Gurps: The Mandalorian

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
So, I viewed with the last ep of season 2 about a week ago and have been contemplating various things and how they would fit into Gurps since.

We can start with a biggie:Beskar armor. What is it? It's a thing that looks like a Combat Hardsuit but has not been seen to be penetrated yet. I think the most powerfula ttack we've seen Mando's armor stop so far would be Ahsoka Tano's lightsabres.
I’ve been thinking about that, too.
What I’ve come up with is: beskar has Hardened 100 vs energy weapons. It’s also tougher than the usual armor plating material (IDHMBWM, so no stats), but it has a CF of +999 based mostly on rarity. Once Mando has the beskar and gives it to the smith, it costs him nothing to have formed because he’s a member of a religious order.

Quote:
We start out with a difficult to prove assumption that a SW "lightsabre" equals a Gurps "Force Sword". I'm sure that it's meant to but have no easy test to prove that it is so at the moment. There's also an assumption that Ahsoka has Weapon Master but I feel this one is not arguable.

So Ahsoka would do 8D+16(5) or 44 pts with a (5) divisor and even Mando's limb armor showed no signs of imminent failure. So it's at least DR 45 with 3 levels of Hardened and quite possibly more. It doesn't stop everything as Mando is seen to react to stopped hits. Perhaps it's an effect of weapons with the "Surge" modifier. They might require a HT roll to avoid being briefly stunned.
I had a thoughts that lightsabers should have a lower base damage, but higher AD - they seem to cut through almost anything, but it needs to have an external force behind any cutting or impaling damage.
Jedi, of course, can get all sorts of cinematic adjustments to their damage with lightsabers.

Quote:
TL10 Combat Hardsuits have DR 75/45 so add the Hardened and you can say that beskar is at least that good. Of course, nothing equivalent to regular TL10 Combat Hardsuits has been seen. I can't remembr off hand any scene anywhere in SW visual canon of "armor" stopping or eeven blunting a blaster shot.
Most SW armor is just a tough enviro suit. Even the best non-beskar armor is only going to help against low-damage attacks (glancing blows, shots at max range, melee attacks).

Quote:
Speaking of "armor" we see a new failure mode for Stormtrooper armor. On two occaissions a downed trooper is finished off with a melee weapon attack with the impact point just off camera. Fragments of a shattered Stormtrooper helmet are seen to fly both times.

The first was with the Mandalorian Smith(Shaman?) and her hammer might have been beskar but we have no way of telling if that adds special effects to a blunt weapon. teh second time was Boba Fett with a thing Tusken raiders make out of scrap metal that's probably equal to a Gurps Warhammer.

I'm not sure how much damage over DR is required to shatter a helmet but it certainly doesn't argue for a high DR for the helmet. My best match for StormTrooper armor so far would be a non-flexible version of TL 10 Ablative Nanoplas with DR 6/36.
As I said above, most SW armor is just a toughened enviro suit, because let’s face it, blasters can pierce (almost) any physical sapient-being-portable armor.
Stormtrooper armor plates may be not only cheap, thin, and no frills, but semi-ablative, too. I would write up their armor as an enviro suit (the black body stocking underneath) plus a whole-body version of the clamshell torso (but cheap).

Quote:
There was actually a second new failure mode. Trooper armor doesn't protect against flamethrowers either. Mando's wrist-mounted flamethrower doesn't match up well with the Flamers in UT. It's more compact and has a shorter range but probably more damage.
Stormtrooper armor isn’t sealed, so the plates aren’t much use against area attacks - only the enviro suit underneath helps, and high-temp wide-area fire is not common enough to bother adding protection for billions of troopers.
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Old 01-15-2021, 08:31 AM   #3
Varyon
 
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Default Re: Gurps: The Mandalorian

I'll need to wait until I've watched season 2 before commenting too much (or paying too much attention; fortunately I had already heard about Ahsoka and Fett showing up but the fewer new spoilers I find the better), but in season 1 I remember his armor got pretty torn up by the big beast he stole the egg from for the Jawas. However, I'm not certain the bits that were damaged were Beskar, or if his armor prior to payment for delivering the Child had only some Beskar parts and the rest was plasteel or similar. I believe Beskar is meant to be particularly effective against energy attacks, like blasters and lightsabers - it's fully Hardened against such attacks at the least, and probably gets extra DR on top of that. It's also likely very effective armor against more physical threats.

Of course, a really important thing to keep in mind is that Star Wars - and thus The Mandalorian by extension - is a highly cinematic setting, where things like how effective armor is are dictated more by story than physics. The Smith absolutely wrecks stormtrooper armor more because she's a badass than because of a Beskar hammer trumping plastoid composite (and "Hey, this thing is capable of working a super-special-awesome material, obviously it would laugh at an inferior material" could also be in play). Something like GURPS generally calls for more concrete stats than "this is MOAR BETTAR," so you'll just need to figure out a scheme that works for you.
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Last edited by Varyon; 01-15-2021 at 11:51 AM. Reason: Fred updated with a spoiler warning, fnord'ed out my spoilers
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Old 01-15-2021, 03:54 PM   #4
naloth
 
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Default Re: Gurps: The Mandalorian

Storm trooper armor seems to electrocute the wearer upon injury. That way you don't have to worry about having injured soldiers since you're just cloning them anyway.

Of course, they should have updated the design of the armor when non-clones started wearing it.
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Old 01-15-2021, 04:13 PM   #5
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Default Re: Gurps: The Mandalorian

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Originally Posted by naloth View Post
Storm trooper armor seems to electrocute the wearer upon injury. That way you don't have to worry about having injured soldiers since you're just cloning them anyway.

Of course, they should have updated the design of the armor when non-clones started wearing it.
Storm troopers are not clone troopers. After the clone wars they stopped the cloning.
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Old 01-15-2021, 08:16 PM   #6
naloth
 
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Default Re: Gurps: The Mandalorian

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Originally Posted by zoncxs View Post
Storm troopers are not clone troopers. After the clone wars they stopped the cloning.
It was semi-serious since you see troopers dropping from what should be less than crippling injuries. Also, the second line should tell you that I know that that stopped using clones.
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Old 01-16-2021, 12:06 AM   #7
Pbuckley
 
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Default Re: Gurps: The Mandalorian

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Originally Posted by naloth View Post
It was semi-serious since you see troopers dropping from what should be less than crippling injuries. Also, the second line should tell you that I know that that stopped using clones.
The official lore is that Storm Trooper armor disperses the energy in such a way that it turns otherwise lethal blows into knockout blows. It's dumb but it's what the lore says. It's easily mass produced armor that ensures you can almost always redeploy the soldier in question. (At least in theory)
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Old 01-16-2021, 01:58 AM   #8
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Default Re: Gurps: The Mandalorian

What I've done is treat stormtrooper armor as Hardshell Armor from Pyramid #3/12 Tech and Toys, "More Ultra! More Tech!", which is analogous to a full suit of Light Clamshell (48 lbs, DR 30 at TL9). If you want it really pitiful, divide DR by 2 for making it TL8 plastic, or by 3 for TL7 plastic.

Multiply weight and DR by 1.5 for a suit based on the heavy clamshell, which would match Mando's initial durasteel armor.

I agree with giving beskar armor several levels of Hardened. I'd look into going 4 levels, actually, though Fett's armor in S2 was shown to have some holes in it from where the sarlacc's digestive system attacked him.

Lightsabers and blasters being as per GURPS Ultra-Tech seem viable. Using the Blaster and Laser Design article with some of The_Ryujin's additions for other blasters (such as the E-WEB we see in the final ep of S1) may give you more selection of weapons.

I not sure how the Tusken gaffi stick would work.
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Old 01-16-2021, 02:01 AM   #9
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Default Re: Gurps: The Mandalorian

Also, IMO, the point of stormtrooper armor is not to protect the soldier; it's to turn the soldier into a faceless enforcer of the Emperor's will. Any protection it gives is secondary to that purpose.

Remember that the Empire initially treated the troopers as expendable; I'd hazard a guess that the stormtrooper armor was made by the lowest bidders, since they had to outfit millions if not billions of soldiers galaxy-wide.
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Old 01-16-2021, 05:43 AM   #10
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Default Re: Gurps: The Mandalorian

I think a large part of storm trooper armor appearing so... flimsy comes down to their using mook rules. A "Realistic Star Wars" might give the armor more DR, etc., on account of removing those cinematic rules.
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