High Guard 2022 Question; Armor, Spinal Mounts, and Damage Multiples

[Meeko100]

I've picked up the 2022 High Guard update and was a bit confused on how armor works with spinal mounts in the update. On the Damage Multiple sidebars it mentions armor being subtracted from the damage total before the multiplier, and then whatever is left over is multiplied to get the damage applied. In the Spinal Section, individual weapon descriptions mention a certain percent of the armor reducing damage by a percent, like 3% per armor point for particle mounts, and so on.

Is it intended for both of these to be done? Reducing damage before the Spinal Multiplier, and then reducing the multiplied damage by a percent of the armor? Or was the armor % a holdover from the last edition of High Guard, I do see the same text in my copy of the older HG.

I like how the damage multipliers make running damage calculations a bit faster and easier compared to the per-weapon percent reduction, but I am uncertain what the intended design was.

 

[tytalan]

I’m not seeing the percentage you mention at all

 

[Meeko100]

Meson guns ignore armor, but the particle and rail gun descriptions here mention the unique armor interactions.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

Spinals are only reduced by armour once, by the percentage.

 

[Tupper]

My understanding from

High Guard Update 2022 - Coming July 29th!

To get off the editing / typo tip for a minute: Thank you for the section on Boarding that gives actual mechanics for damage caused to the ship from high penetration weapons and also penalizes long-weapon use inside ships! Now we finally have mechanical reasons for why Cutlasses and Snub Pistols...

forum.mongoosepublishing.com

is that you do both: reduce the damage by the armour as an absolute value, and then reduce it by a percentage as a follow up.

The reason for the additional reduction is that the absolute reduction is not very big for large spinal mounts.

The one thing I'm still not 100% clear on is for a railgun, does AP also affect the armour for percentage reduction? For example, does armour 15 have no effect on railguns (AP20) or does it reduce their damage by 30%? My hunch says the latter.

 

[Tupper]

PS you might have to click on the reference in the above post to jump to the conversation in question.

 

[AnotherDilbert]

is that you do both: reduce the damage by the armour as an absolute value, and then reduce it by a percentage as a follow up.

All respect to Annatar, but I don't think his opinion is official. His example used very light armour for HG'22, I believe.

Deducting armour both from the roll and as a percentage makes no sense to me. Spinals can be built in any size from one to about ten units, say 8D damage to 80D damage. Deducting perhaps 20 Armour from 8D is very different from 80D, that's why the percentage reduction was introduced instead, to give armour a role regardless the size of the spinal.

With a military hull you can have Armour 24 at TL-12, giving a 72% damage reduction for Particle spinals and a up to 90% at TL-15. I really don't think you need to nerf Particle spinals any more than that...

 

[Condottiere]

1. Armour is meant to prevent damage from kinetic impact.

2. Meson weapon systems are insidious because they bypass this physical barrier.

3. Armour factor current at the time of impact, gets multiplied by whatever percentage factor the rules mention, whether two or three percent, and that gets deducted from the damage that particular attack inflicts on the ship.

4. Whether this makes sense or not, going by battleship armour experience, the attack needs to overcome the strength of the armour, which might reduce the strength of the attack, hence the percentage factor.

5. If the attack is too strong, it might just pass through the hull, out the other side, and the only damage inflicted would be along that straight line.

6. We know by the pseudo physics explanation that the decaying mesons express themselves explosively, hopefully within the interior of the targetted hull.

7. I'm not sure how a twenty tonne slug and an accelerated beam of particles do that, unless they meet a barrier that allows that release of energy.

8. So I assume that contact with the armour triggers that, which includes reducing said damage by being thick, plus whatever happens to be in the remaining path.

9. It's quite possible, that an unarmoured destroyer might survive such a hit, if it passes through the empty fuel tanks.

 

[wingsday]

This is one of the areas where the fleet combat rules work way better imo

 

[Shadowblayde99]

I've been looking for information on all the special equipment for the Harrier in Pirates of Drinax.

Noticed that there is no mention of the 3x damage multiplier for the Barbette in the core rulebook 2022 update. It's only in High Guard......unless I'm just missing it.

This is definitely an oversight and is really needed to be in the core book.