Making Melee viable vs future weapons.

[vierasmarius]

What? Are you saying that Alien: Resurrection and Jason X lied to me? *shock*

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by RyanW

That gets stated so often, but anything that can survive a micrometeor strike isn't going to be terribly inconvenienced by a bullet, and as Mythbusters showed, standard air pressure does not create enough force to push someone through a bullet hole. This has been (accidentally) tested with a partial suit failure during a shuttle mission. The injury was mistaken for chafing until the hole in the glove was found.

What is an issue is exposed equipment. You don't want a bullet passing through a vital part of your life support system. Also, ricochets can be inconvenient.

it not be sucked threw into a vacuum I was talking about, but the Bullet sized hole in enough to suck the air out and turn the compartment your in into a vacuum. (and I'm not talking about explosive decompression either)

[Joseph Paul]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

it not be sucked threw into a vacuum I was talking about, but the Bullet sized hole in enough to suck the air out and turn the compartment your in into a vacuum. (and I'm not talking about explosive decompression either)

The bullet sized hole places a limit on how fast the air can be removed from a compartment of a given volume. I suspect that in most cases it is going to take tens of minutes to bring the pressure down to something that will be a problem. That is more than enough time for dumb automated patches to be deployed that will plug the hole which is both a reasonable precaution and technology. So there is an interesting visual of having a wild gun fight and lots of patch balloons obscuring LOS as well as possibly popping in unintentional places.

Anyone have actual math to look at the whole "OMG! There's a hole in my spaceship and we are all gonna die!" scenario?

[cptbutton]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

Anyone have actual math to look at the whole "OMG! There's a hole in my spaceship and we are all gonna die!" scenario?

I can't cite it, but years ago I read someone saying something like if you emptied two clips from a sub-machine gun into the walls of the Mir space station it would take 15 minutes before the air loss became immediately dangerous, which was plenty of time to win a gun fight in such close quarters and start slapping on patches.

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by Frost

While the risk is there it is probably somewhat overplayed. Leaving aside wether expanding/ frangible rounds are going to be effective against internal paneling or the casings of primary components as an ultra tech scenario there are other ranged options which certainly shouldn't offer anything like the same risk.

Actully that was part of the stated sinarior, that the Powers the Be (and the Black marketers) can and do arm themselves with some type ultra tech range weapon that not a threat to the structure (Said energy weapons), And these weapons have to deal with the normal arms race for effective armor. My statement was however said armors to be effective aren't no where near effective against more physical attacks, but are bulk enough that while ther cost benefit makes them worht to ware agasing the deadly ultra tech ranged weapons (turning basical an insti kill into some that protetional srviavable, just like the normal armors arms race) But too bulky to layer it with addtional armor that is effective against melee weapons.

While the Energy Weapons are not useless. However Melee weapons can now be an effective option.

Originally Posted by Frost

At the same time I think you are underplaying the risk posed by failed melee attacks.

I would disagree becuase side a few rare weapons you no longer dung you full Melee damage once you miss because you are in the process of recovering your stance which has the same effect as pulling your punch. Though I never claimed such weapons could not caught deliberate damage, but that's a different kettle of fish.

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

The bullet sized hole places a limit on how fast the air can be removed from a compartment of a given volume. I suspect that in most cases it is going to take tens of minutes to bring the pressure down to something that will be a problem. That is more than enough time for dumb automated patches to be deployed that will plug the hole which is both a reasonable precaution and technology. So there is an interesting visual of having a wild gun fight and lots of patch balloons obscuring LOS as well as possibly popping in unintentional places.

Doesn't sound like the likely automated system. The likely automated systems is the compartmental door automatically close and lock as soon as a pressing issue is detected and will not open again until the correct authentication is used to unlock them, to buy time repairs--either manual or automated depends in the tech--to be preformed, reducing the danger to other compartments. A more 'total recall' style dystopic might also automatics start pumping the compartment air into storage to save the prestige resource, unless a suitable authentication overrides the action.

So said compdates are either way are locked until untill the authenticated show up, and in the latter case just as up the creek as if it was a bigger breech unless they have the codes.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

Anyone have actual math to look at the whole "OMG! There's a hole in my spaceship and we are all gonna die!" scenario?

An A square centimeter hole will halve the air pressure in a V cubic meter compartment every 35*V/A seconds.

Edit: approximately

[lwcamp]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

The bullet sized hole places a limit on how fast the air can be removed from a compartment of a given volume. I suspect that in most cases it is going to take tens of minutes to bring the pressure down to something that will be a problem. That is more than enough time for dumb automated patches to be deployed that will plug the hole which is both a reasonable precaution and technology. So there is an interesting visual of having a wild gun fight and lots of patch balloons obscuring LOS as well as possibly popping in unintentional places.

Anyone have actual math to look at the whole "OMG! There's a hole in my spaceship and we are all gonna die!" scenario?

Air escaping into vacuum through a small hole will produce a jet moving at approximately the speed of sound in the pre-expansion air. Call this c, and it will be approximately 300 m/s. The mass dm of gas going through the hole in a time dt will be
dM = - rho A c dt
where rho is the gas density, A is the area of the hole. If m is the molar mass, P is the pressure, T the temperature, and R the ideal gas constant
rho = m P / (R T)
dM = - A c m P dt / (R T).
If the volume of the compartment opened to vacuum is V, the mass of air inside that compartment is
M = rho V = V m P / (R T).
We now have
dM = - (A c / V) M dt
or equivalently,
M = M0 exp( - A c t / V)
for initial mass M0 at time t=0. This can be more conveniently expressed in terms of pressure
P = M R T / (V m)
P = P0 exp( - A c t / V).
You might expect a bullet to produce a hole about 1 cm^2 in area. A typical room in a cramped spacecraft might be 2 m x 2 m x 2.5 m, or 10 m^3. We thus see that in a time
t = V / (A c) = 10 m^3 / (0.0001 m^2 * 300 m/s) ~ 300 s
the pressure will have dropped by a factor of 1/e ~ 0.37. The time to drop the pressure by a factor of 2 is about 250 s (to within the accuracy of the crude approximations we have been making), or about 4 minutes. Fit people can survive on half an atmosphere of earth-composition air, a third of a standard atmosphere's pressure causes extreme hardship. So with a single bullet hole in the wall of a small pressure compartment will give the inhabitants about 4 to 5 minutes to do something. This time scales with the volume of the compartment, and inversely with the number of holes and the size of the holes (so with four or five bullet holes in the same size compartment, you would have about a minute).

But to change topics somewhat - what prevents the attackers from suiting up in armored pressure suits and using guns? They don't care if the place gets shot up, and if the defenders are using low penetration rounds to minimize damage to the spacecraft their bullets will not go through the armor, either.

Luke

[starslayer]

Originally Posted by sabanknight

...

Id prefer it to be based on the prowess of the user and less the weapon (IE Virbo/High Density/ect) without the user having Striking ST 30+! The other addition is of course targeted strikes hitting a head neck ect but still against non human targets I still need a little more...

...


To reitterate: I DO NOT want it to be equipment reliant, yes yes ive read UT melee options, I do not want these, I am looking for answers on the technique/skill/martial arts end of things.

This makes it hard, because the first thing that came to mind is 'vibro-blades get AP 10, and the best you can get in bullets is AP 2; done!'

Well you seem willing to step well aside from the book, and mentioned 'not quite force weapons'

so

Option 1: completely unmarried strength and damage- like say a blade that has strength equal to the skill of the person wielding it, AND divides armor by 1/5th skill. So to a sword-saint it is a high damage armour-ignorant deathblade, but to someone untrained it's just a bulky sword almost identical to a run of the mill vibro-blade.

Option 2: Psi-weapon- damage is based off of willpower instead of strength; completely ignores armour on living targets, causes surges in electric equipment with HT penalty to MOS on a will roll (So a fighter with will 15 can't HURT a machine at all, but can shut it down quite reliably).

[ate89]

Ok, here is how I did it in my campaign. I created two sets of damage; one for the already existing damage types cut,imp,burn etc.... and a new damage type called photon that would be used for future weapons. The armor available in game would offer a physical armor and a resistance force field against photon. DR ended up looking like 15/150 for the individual sets of armor but it provided a good middle ground. The high energy laser rifles and photon swords were balanced against the preexisting hazards of falling, getting hit by cars, or claw attacks from alien wild life. It also balanced characters who preferred using knifes and spears to energy swords or mono wire whips and the like.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by ate89

Ok, here is how I did it in my campaign. I created two sets of damage; one for the already existing damage types cut,imp,burn etc.... and a new damage type called photon that would be used for future weapons. The armor available in game would offer a physical armor and a resistance force field against photon. DR ended up looking like 15/150 for the individual sets of armor but it provided a good middle ground. The high energy laser rifles and photon swords were balanced against the preexisting hazards of falling, getting hit by cars, or claw attacks from alien wild life. It also balanced characters who preferred using knifes and spears to energy swords or mono wire whips and the like.

So why wouldn't anybody use bullets (3d for sidearms, easily 7d for longarms) against the puny DR15?