Vehicle hit locations

[Anonymous]

Is there a way to determine the chance to hit vehicle locations? I've seen the mek chart, but doesn't seem to work for a vehicle very well. Might be overlooking it and if so would appreciate some guidance. Thanks.

 

[Lane Shutt]

AFAIK there is no table, yet.

They do have "to hit" numbers for the various size turrets.
If you subtract the turret numbers from 20 the remainder is hull and propulsion. I would use 1/3 for wheels and 1/2 for tracks or hover drives.

Then you have a problem of no way to armor wheels or tracks.

 

[Draco Argentum]

Since wheels/tracks have no armour I'd be inclined to leave them off the hit location chart. The SP values would be used when the vehicle hits a landmine.

 

[Lane Shutt]

It would be great to ignore hit locations for tracks and wheels but what do you do about hovercraft? Removing the hit location removes their disadvantage.

 

[Draco Argentum]

It dosen't quite remove it. Although they only have a 10% chance of setting a mine off if they do it automatically renders them immobile. Tracks and wheels are more resistant to detonations but suffer more of them.

The immunity of an airskirt to HP damage is problematic. If wheels/tracks were on the hit location chart a heavy sniper rifle with HEAM ammo could be used to destroy them but not a skirt. Also note that mines, the anti mek missile and other personal equipment that does HEAM damage all to HP damage. So technically hovercraft are immune to mines.

 

[Lane Shutt]

You've discovered the rules paradox.

Hovercraft skirts are immune to hitpoint level damage yet have no armor points or hardness.

Small arms, antimek missiles (but not mines?) have HEAM ammo available which would indicate they could damage hard armor since it ignores hardness for steel.

The personal combat section describes Structure Point level damage as hitpoint damage divided by ten.

This means most rifles can cause 1 SP damage (10 HP) which would destroy the skirt on hovercraft which should (by description) be immune to HP damage.

This is also confused by the rules for Mek weapons vs. Soft Armor.
The 12.7 mm machine gun does D3 damage (SP level) and auto kills soft armored vehicles (even when using anti-personnel ammo?). However D3 SP damage is only 3D6 HP and ignores DR from soft armor, thus a vehicle with 100 hp (equal to 10 SP) and DR 35 is destroyed by as little as 3 hp (1 sp) damage. Then you have the case of HP level weapons vs hard armor. An AK-47 assault rifle 3D8 HP AP 6 will be reduced by most soft armor. But against Hard armor it has a 72% chance of doing 1 SP and 9% of 2 Sp damage. That means it is more effective against hard armor with less than 20 points than against soft armor with DR 20.

 

[Draco Argentum]

Agreed. The most extreme example is the B-3 bomber. With DR 50 its nearly immune to small arms. Yet a single burst from a 10mm maching gun automatically destroys it.

I cooked this up as a fix:
To convert SP damage to HP damage multiply by 20. Penetration is equal to the weapon's caliber.

If an object has a hardness score it is immune to HP damage. If it has Hard armour but no hardness score subtract 30 then divide by 20. If it has structure points but no hardness or hard armour subtract 20 then divide by 20. (Note: use normal mathematical rules for rounding here.)

Maximum allowable DR is 40.


To use this you will need to convert all of the antimek weapons that currently do HP damage to SP damage.

 

[Lane Shutt]

An even simpler option:

Hard Armor has a DR 20 - this makes all but the lightest (9 points or less) hard armor safe from small arms and even heavy machine guns could only do 2 SP damage.

Mek weapons, mainly auto cannon and machine-guns, firing anti-personell ammo have AP 15 and do (max SP damage) D12 HP - this places them close to personnel weapons but the AP is slightly higher due to burst fire. They still suffer DR against hard armor.

Mek weapons firing anything but anti-personell ammo ignore DR, however they do not auto destroy the target. Instead they do normal (max SP damage) D12 HP damage. - This makes them deadly against soft targets but not overpowering. A 12.7 mm machine gun still has to shoot a few times to destroy a heavy truck, a lot of the shots go right trough doing little damage.

Personell weapons which have AP of "-" ignore DR, including that of hard armor. They do SP= HP/ 10 damage. - No change from published rules.