Keeping up with Armor

J. L. Brown said:
No, stuff that is under active development is not 'at our Technology Level'. If we had the existing technology and production capacity to make those items, then they would not be 'under development'.

And both underwater suits and vacuum-protection suits fail in crucial ways:
1} They provide no armor protection;
2} They are extremely cumbersome and difficult to move around in;
3} They weigh FAR too much.

The CA-4 Dead-Boy armor cited above weighs 20 pounds. A US Army kevlar vest & ceramic inserts (does not include helmet, legs, or environmental protection) comes out to 26 pounds. A Space Shuttle suit weighs 310 pounds. A modern deep-diving hard suit (the Exosuit) weighs in at 530 pounds -- and check out the wonderful manual dexterity the wearer has! There is simply no way whatsoever for us to make anything like the dead-boy suit today.

Even if we cut a space suit down to only on tenth of its' current mass, we would be over-weight -- and then we would need to add yet more weight to add armor.

And societies where 'every death is considered an unrecoverable and unacceptable tragedy' do not field armies. Those societies which do, are faced with the idea of spending an infinite amount on a single super-soldier (who would still lose because they can only be in one place at a time), or divide up their existing, finite budget on building the most effective fighting force they can manage. In the latter scenario, every soldier who becomes a casualty is a drain on war-fighting resources, so it makes sense to keep your soldiers (as much as the nature of war allows) from becoming casualties. But keeping your soldiers from dying is pointless if they cannot defeat (or even threaten) the enemy, so not all of the available budget will be spent on armor.

It is a very reasonable approximation that military-issue armor is the best that can be managed within very real limits.
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Here is an "Iron Man suit". It is the right size and bullet-resistant. It is non-powered. It can be walked and moved in. So there is your armor basis. Adding the computers and climate-controlled life support isn't that difficult. Same with minimum fire protection. Same with the radio and loudspeaker. This is can be done by one guy with a 3D printer. The hard part is the radiation protection. As far as the ease of putting it on and taking it off. It requires a staff, same as the armor worn by knights historically.

btw... I love Adam Savage's shows

PS- You can be still developing stuff at your TL. Just because a civilization is TL8 doesn't mean that they have mastered all TL8 tech.
 
Looks like an experimental/prototype Poly Carapace in game terms. Okay. I don't know that I'd accept that climate controlled life support et al "isn't that difficult", but that's not actually the issue. Which to my mind is:

What does that have to do with layering other types of armor on top of each other? The question was not "are the listed armors the best possible at that tech level?" No, that's what the prototype/experimental rules are for. They are what is widely available on a commercial basis. And just putting on several different suits of armor at the same time does not generally result in something you can actually function in.
 
Geez; I'm not sure whether to be insulted or just laugh. Firstly, the 'Iron Man Suit' is nothing like an actual suit -- the abdominal covering is made of polyurethane (plastic). This is a toy; a hand-made one-off from a guy who did special effects for movies. The only part which has any armor value at all is ribcage area, and it is made out of titanium -- and titanium is very familiar to modern armor makers. We don't use it, because it is not particularly good armor. And the armor is the EASY part -- notice in the list of weights I provided above, the kevlar & inserts vest was less than a tenth the mass of everything else? 'All the other stuff' is exactly the stuff that should not be hand-waved away; it is the part which is the real challenge.

If you are going to cite armor suits as examples of what we can do in the real world, at least cite suits that are not movie props. Like maybe Troy Hurtubise with his Ursa VII armor -- which weighed in at 40 pounds, and would have fared poorly against anyone with a rifle. Watching Troy waddle around in that stuff is sufficient basis for 'your character takes serious penalties while wearing it'.

And Vormaerin is right -- the topic was about characters in Traveller trying to sidestep the limitations of armor by wearing multiple suits. Do you believe anyone would be able to wear two or more copies of Dead-Boy, Iron-man, or Ursus VII armor? OR -- any of those armors, plus another armor? Again, we can make armor sufficient to protect people from a 120mm hypervelocity armor penetration round -- but that armor weighs the same as an Abrams tank because it IS an Abrams tank. Nobody walks around in a suit of tank-proof armor, because it is not technologically possible to make a personal suit of that armor practical. Nobody in Traveller should be able to invent super-armor (that everyone else has completely missed for a thousand years) by wearing two different off-the-shelf bits of kit -- if it was that easy, it would have already been done.
 
The 3-8 AV range for "civilian" armors characters might actually wear without looking like maniacs matches up reasonably well with the 2 or 3D damage output of civilian weapons a character might reasonably have in routine situations.

They are, of course, outclassed by military grade weaponry, both because of increased damage and armor piercing. For that, you need advanced armors.

If you run your campaign such that characters can run around looking like storm troopers and using advanced combat rifles, the system works pretty well. If you run your campaign where characters need to be lowkey with John Wick suits and pistols/basic rifles, the system works.

The problems come when one side of the equation is milspec and the other side isn't. It's easier in Traveller to end up with characters with military weapons without them having access to military armors, but going the other way and having combat armor levels of defense against foes with pistols is equally problematic.

This is not a thing that is going to be resolved by rules, imho. Traveller is intended to be usable for Hammer's Slammers style games as well as Stainless Steel Rat games, so both levels of gear need to exist. The table simply needs to decide what tone they want. If it is reasonable for the players to have it, then it is usually reasonable for the NPCs to have it. And vice versa.

And when the story does result in a mismatch, then in that story the combat isn't the focus. Either it's "they are outclassed, so what do you do in the aftermath?" or "You are outclassed here, what do you do to get around this obstacle some other way?"
 
You can layer reflec both internally and externally, and sandwich something else inbetween.

And then an ablative and/or cloth poncho.
 
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J. L. Brown said:
Geez; I'm not sure whether to be insulted or just laugh. Firstly, the 'Iron Man Suit' is nothing like an actual suit -- the abdominal covering is made of polyurethane (plastic). This is a toy; a hand-made one-off from a guy who did special effects for movies. The only part which has any armor value at all is ribcage area, and it is made out of titanium -- and titanium is very familiar to modern armor makers. We don't use it, because it is not particularly good armor. And the armor is the EASY part -- notice in the list of weights I provided above, the kevlar & inserts vest was less than a tenth the mass of everything else? 'All the other stuff' is exactly the stuff that should not be hand-waved away; it is the part which is the real challenge.

If you are going to cite armor suits as examples of what we can do in the real world, at least cite suits that are not movie props. Like maybe Troy Hurtubise with his Ursa VII armor -- which weighed in at 40 pounds, and would have fared poorly against anyone with a rifle. Watching Troy waddle around in that stuff is sufficient basis for 'your character takes serious penalties while wearing it'.

And Vormaerin is right -- the topic was about characters in Traveller trying to sidestep the limitations of armor by wearing multiple suits. Do you believe anyone would be able to wear two or more copies of Dead-Boy, Iron-man, or Ursus VII armor? OR -- any of those armors, plus another armor? Again, we can make armor sufficient to protect people from a 120mm hypervelocity armor penetration round -- but that armor weighs the same as an Abrams tank because it IS an Abrams tank. Nobody walks around in a suit of tank-proof armor, because it is not technologically possible to make a personal suit of that armor practical. Nobody in Traveller should be able to invent super-armor (that everyone else has completely missed for a thousand years) by wearing two different off-the-shelf bits of kit -- if it was that easy, it would have already been done.
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Having done Renn Faires, I know that I wear padded armor beneath My chainmail armor. Not everything can be stacked, but some armors are designed that way. Such as the skintight high TL Vacc-suit that can be worn under clothing and armor. Armor is by and large a piecemeal type thing. Individual chest protection. Individual head protection. Knee and shin protection, etc... Most modern armor isn't even actually a "suit" of armor, it is merely bits and pieces that cover the various parts of the body and most can be worn without the other parts. Such as a bullet-resistant vest and a helmet. To wear gloves or to not wear gloves. In Our current world, most things are modular, guns, armor, transportation. Several disparate parts are used together to create a whole. Traveller has rules for piecemeal armor in one of the books. Can't remember where I saw it though. The old CSC maybe? Usually in the case of armor, one type of armor protects you from one type of threat to one part of your body, with some overlap. For example, an enclosed helmet will protect you from primarily projectiles, but it will also protect you from the sonic component of flashbang grenades. A bullet-resistant vest will stop most handguns, but to increase your protection, you need to install ceramic plates inside the pockets of the vest.
Obviously stacking must be limited from a game point of view so things don't get ridiculous and out of hand, but some stacking should not only be allowed, but also make sense.
 
Sure. If you specifically designate armor like that within the rules and have the appropriate tradeoffs. Traveller doesn't generally do this (with the exception of anti-laser armors in certain cases). It would certainly be a fruitful field for a JTAS article. :p

But just expecting to put mesh over your cloth armor is not the same thing. The padded gambeson is designed to go under metal armor to reduce chafing and improve resistance to impacts. It is reasonable to assume that "Mesh" already has that as part of its ratings, because that's the normal use case.

Keep in mind that much of the 'stacking' in real world armor is to create resistances to different kinds of strikes or to put protection on specific vulnerable locations. Things that the Traveller system does not include in its mechanics.
 
OK, getting back to the rules question...
I don't care how many layers you tack on to it. IMTU only the top layer counts.
Unless you want Every. Single. Firefight. to include at least two guys on rooftops firing 15mm 'crunch' guns and HEAPDU ammo.
PROTIP: You don't want that.
 
And since I too am a practitioner of meme warfare and the subject is armor, here's one sent to me by my old SCA fighter buddies
 

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Since they can't use pointy sticks, the point of the exercise is to actually corral you, in extreme cases, isolate and beat you up in detail.
 
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And let's be clear about this... there are some police forces that are WELL practiced in the Art and Science of Riot/Protest Suppression.
I would put some serious thought into eff'ing about with South Korean, Greek, and Turkish cops. Those dudes have only a passing familiarity with human rights and the concept of illegal search and seizure and give absolutely zero eff's about your feelings or your demands to talk to a supervisor. You start trouble with them, and they're pull out some crap that'll have you wishing you'd stayed the Hell home.
 
ottarrus said:
And let's be clear about this... there are some police forces that are WELL practiced in the Art and Science of Riot/Protest Suppression.
I would put some serious thought into eff'ing about with South Korean, Greek, and Turkish cops. Those dudes have only a passing familiarity with human rights and the concept of illegal search and seizure and give absolutely zero eff's about your feelings or your demands to talk to a supervisor. You start trouble with them, and they're pull out some crap that'll have you wishing you'd stayed the Hell home.
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I meant more on an SCA battlefield, but I get your meaning and agree.
 
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