should there actually be "indestructible" weapons?

[Plane]

In terms of characters there's no 3e immunity anymore so you can't be indestructible in 4e, just have loads of DR or injury divisors.

It seems however there are certain Ultratech objects which enjoy this property.

UT164 Stasis Switchblade

Due to the stasis web,
the switchblade cannot be broken
and can be used to parry a force blade
or similar energy-based attack

UT166

a blade of annihilating energy extends from the hilt and is held in shape by a force field.
The blade cannot break

You simply could not make a "weapon as a character" this durable AFAIK.

It's possible to stat "creature made out of energy" and assign it stuff reflecting that like Diffuse or Insubstantial to supplement 'Injury Divisor' or Damage Resistance.

That stuff still needs to have HP though, so shouldn't the "force field" and "annihilating energy" within it actually have HP so they can be destroyed?

If you use Precognitive Parry to block lasers w/ any kind of material object there's always some kind of limit to what it can stop, so giving unlimited capacity seems strange.

- - -

If we were to stat this in some way (ie there's a hypothetical laser strong enough to breach the forcefield and AE within it) can anyone think of guidelines on how we might stat it?

I was thinking there might be some means of backwards-engineering and estimate by the power demands the weapons have (like a power Cell per 300 seconds) if we subtract out the ongoing damage.

Like presumably since the damage can't break free, it has some kind of Force Field DR which protects against it's own burning damage, yet which does not provide Cover DR against that damage when striking others with it.

- - -

How this "force field works" (it allows the energy to burn things outside of the force field yet inhibits the energy from spreading?) is pretty confusing.

Ultratech seems to have tweaked it too: critically successful parries (even unarmed ones?) no longer suffer from automatic Burning Damage anymore...

This in theory means "I can bare-hand touch the tip of your 7-yard Force Whip and I'm just fine".

This might be explained by somehow contacting the Force Field around the Annihilating Energy lightly enough to redirect it without actually touching it directly enough to move through it and make contact with that energy.

This of course further complicates "designing the force sword via advantages" since while Powers did introduce "Destructive Parry" to emulate Force Swords, it doesn't have that "except on critical successes" drawback.

Would that be like a -1% nuisance effect? Doesn't seem worth a full -5% since crit success defences are so rare.

- - -

Assuming a "weapon as character" reflecting a Force Sword has something like Burning Attack (Aura) to explain it's contact energy, with subsequent rulings of "once per second" should a Force Sword be limited in 'damage per second' that way as well?

Originally Posted by Kromm

For the sake of game balance, Aura shouldn't damage anyone more than once per turn. Otherwise, you'll get silly results in close combat.
Measure "turn" from start to start: From when I start this turn until I start my next turn, a given Aura can hurt me only once, no matter what me and the person with the Aura do, either during the active part of my turn or during everything that happens afterward.

Aura (+80%) + Melee Attack (-30%) is worth +50% because it could affect all the attackers around you if they foolishly decided to swarm you in close combat.

We eyeballed that as being approximately equal to Area Effect, 2 yards, +50%, which always affects an area of similar size to "my hex and all the hexes around me."

The upsides "discourages attackers" and "requires no action" and the downsides "specific trigger condition" and "has no range" looked like a wash.

If you start adding what amounts to Rapid Fire to it, it soon gets out of whack . . . if you really want that, buy Rapid Fire and say the Aura can affect each person up to RoF times.

For instance, Aura (+80%) + Melee Attack (-30%) + Rapid Fire, RoF 3 (+50%) would cost +100% and be able to affect a given enemy up to three times (say, once for you punching him and twice when he punches you twice).

You can presumably hit someone multiple times per turn w/ a Force Sword, so if we treat it like a character who has 'aura' we should know how many levels of RoF the melee attack has.

I guess (to allow light-speed jedis) you could say it's ROF 300 (highest possible) so that it only ever comes up for people who can attack 301 times per second, but that seems a bit extreme, which is why I'm wondering if we could somehow estimate it to lower levels of the enhancement based on the weapon's power supply, cost and TL.

- - -

UT96 also has sort of an "absolute" outcome of death if you're 'inside a solid object' when the exophase field generator is used. Is that also what happens if someone uses Negate Advantage on Insubstantiality while someone's in the middle of a wall?

It seems like maybe one could come up with some kind of intense damage number alternative to represent stuff like creatures who are Diffuse and might be prone to surviving that type of thing if re-materialized.

Especially since you could have partial outcomes like "my torso is through the wall but my head isn't" where it might be analagous to having a giant lance driven through the torso to the vitals (which some Unkillable things might survive)

[David Johnston2]

I would interpret that as "can not be broken by any reasonable source of damage applicable to such a small target". The hilts aren't unbreakable and if you break them the energy fields shut down.

[Donny Brook]

Power gadgets are unbreakable if you don't take Breakable.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

I would interpret that as "can not be broken by any reasonable source of damage applicable to such a small target".
The hilts aren't unbreakable and if you break them the energy fields shut down.

I mean actually breaking the energy field itself, which is a much bigger target than the hilt.

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

Power gadgets are unbreakable if you don't take Breakable.

That does seem strange, yeah. I always figure if you had 0% that the GM could opt to assign HP so long as he gave it at least DR 26. Taking 25 DR (breakable) has incentive of -5% discount but there doesn't seem to be incentive to take DR26+ if you could take indestructible.

Especially if it's SM 0+ and could be used like indestructible cover. You should probably have to pay for something like "I own a SM+4 wall with 5000 DR" (as an Ally maybe?) separately from "and I get powers when I touch it".

Or maybe something along the lines of "unless you assign HP and DR it lacks cover DR" so it's some kind of ethereal "magic helmet I wear which others can steal and wear themselves but which doesn't actually provide cover, it's indestructible because it's non-interactive aside from visuals" ?

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Plane

I mean actually breaking the energy field itself, which is a much bigger target than the hilt.

I know what you meant. But 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.

Especially if it's SM 0+ and could be used like indestructible cover. You should probably have to pay for something like "I own a SM+4 wall with 5000 DR" (as an Ally maybe?) separately from "and I get powers when I touch it".

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). 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

[Varyon]

Gear doesn't have to follow the same rules as characters, so indestructible gear is acceptable. And, of course, characters can have indestructible traits. 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. 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). 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).

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). 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.

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.

[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.

[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.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Plane

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

Gods can generally bypass non-cosmic defenses without needing explicit stats to that effect, but simply having Cosmic: Irresistible Attack would let you get through a force sword. In a similar vein, if the GM decides the "indestructible" remnant that's left of you when Unkillable 2 comes into play can, in fact, be destroyed by throwing it into a black hole, then unless black holes are a common hazard, that's not really worth points (arguably, not even then, unless your characters also have the means of escaping a black hole after crossing the event horizon - "your character is unplayable because he's been utterly destroyed" and "your character is unplayable because his remains are in a black hole, and there's no way to retrieve them" and fairly indistinguishable from the perspective of the players... or indeed the characters).

Originally Posted by Plane

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

Yeah... don't do that. Not if you want it to be indestructible, anyway. If you want a character who is somehow like a force blade, you'll need to define some DR, HP, etc. However, "you can't make a character who functions like this" is a poor excuse for not allowing items that function a certain way. Indeed, one of the benefits of gear over abilities is that the GM can just define the way gear functions without needing to worry about how to build it as a power or whatever.

Originally Posted by Plane

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

If you want force blades that function in a consistent manner with the force fields they make use of, this is the kind of thing you'll probably need to do. Otherwise, just fiat it to be whatever you want - maybe force blades just have DR 100, and if this is penetrated it turns off. Or the hilt short circuits and requires repair. Or the annihilating energy breaches containment and blasts everything nearby with an 8d(5) burn exp attack. Or magical unicorns pop up and gore whoever broke it.

Originally Posted by Plane

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.

Using my suggestion, I'd have it be semi-ablative DR that recovers 10% of its maximum DR every second, just like a force screen. As a safety, I'd have damage go down proportionally to DR - at full DR it can safely contain an 8d(5) burn beam, but as DR is reduced it needs to tone down the power of the beam to make certain said beam doesn't breach containment. If the field is penetrated but not reduced to 0 DR, you'll get a visible spark and there may be a chance for anything nearby to catch some 1-point burn "fragments" as some of the energy sparks out through the brief gap. If the field is indeed reduced to 0 DR, the blade is just unable to do any damage until some of the DR has regenerated. DR regenerates at the end of the character's turn (although any DR lost during the character's turn doesn't regenerate until the end of that character's next turn).

If someone overrides the safeties, such that it stays 8d(5) burn regardless of DR, I'd say the blade is generally stable above 70% DR - although below 100% DR, on a roll of 17 or 18 on an attack, there's a malfunction, which typically shuts it down and requires minor repairs before the weapon will function again (1-3 on 1d), may cause it to severely short out, causing 1d burn sur to the wielder's hand and requiring major repairs before the weapon will function again (4-5 on 1d), or can cause total loss of containment, destroying the weapon outright and causing 8d burn exp centered in the wielder's hex (6 on 1d). At 70% DR and lower, the weapon must make an HT roll upon any attack that hits or is blocked/parried, or anytime the weapon is attacked or makes a successful Parry. Failure results in a Malfunction, as above, but add MoF/2 (round down) to the 1d roll, treating any result above 6 (explosion) as a 6. Every -1 to SSR - 50%, 30%, 20%, 15%, etc - is -1 to the HT roll. Optionally, at 20% and lower, the weapon must make an HT roll, at +3 (net +0 at 20%), at the start of each round - with such a weak containment, it's at risk of shorting out or exploding simply from being on.

[naloth]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

Power gadgets are unbreakable if you don't take Breakable.

Nah, it means DR 26+ (GM assigned) or an explanation like "lots of spares" such as Corsair in Super Scum. Such devices should also have an assigned weight and HP.

Innate Attacks are basically indestructible without gadget limitations, though arguably a Power Parry overcomes the intensity.