Battledress a vehicle?

[stofsk]

According to the THB the Battledress armour is similar to Combat Armour, but is considered a vehicle. Actual quote: "Battle Dress is a suit of personal armour similar in construction to Combat Armor." (p.285) In the Technology and Equipment chapter, quotes: "...Battle Dress is an advanced and powered version of combat armour." Combat Armour is like a hardened vac suit, yet it is unpowered. So therefore, it's like wearing normal armour, but with (presumably) a battery for integrated electronics.

Now if Battledress is like Combat Armour, why is there an upscaling in regards to damage reduction by treating BD like a vehicle? Remember, that means the first five damage dice get removed before regular DR goes into effect, and Battledress has an armour rating of 10 anyway.

That... is obscene amount of protection given what is ostensibly an infantry role. The fluff material admits that using BD is like 'wearing' it rather than driving it or piloting it. So why is there a distinction between combat armour (unpowered) and battle dress (a vehicle you 'wear' rather than drive?). As I understand it, the rationale to upscale combat is to promote realism. A guy with a gun versus a tank, you can see it, how much difference is there in mass alone? A guy wouldn't weigh any more than 90-100kg, maybe, taking equipment and armour into account. (I weigh 75kg but I'm not as fit as I could be, doesn't matter though because combat armour at TL11 - IE when it is first introduced - weighs 18kg and factoring in all other equipment, that would put me in that 100kg ballpark - more advanced combat armour is lighter)

Battledress is 300vl according to THB, and I'm not sure what the conversion is between vl and kg, but I doubt it would make all that much difference as they're no so large as to treat it like a vehicle and thus take away the first five dice in combat. So help me understand why this is so.

 

[Valarian]

If the Battledress in Traveller is comparable to the Elemental Armour in Battletech then this amount of damage reduction is justified. The armour in Battletech absorbs shots from 'Mech weapons. Shots from Infantry weapons just bounce off.

 

[veltyen]

That... is obscene amount of protection given what is ostensibly an infantry role.

BD has any role you give it. If your legions numbering in the millions are all equiped with BD, then yes, its obscene. But not all Army/Marine/Navy personel even have the ability to use BD.

I think of BD more as an elite response troop equipment, rather then standard wear.

I use variant scaling to fix this to some extent. BD scales at 2 rather then 5. That and military class weapons.

combat armour ... weighs 18kg

Kinda. It has an encumberance of 18kg. Which is not quite the same thing. Actual weight should be about 30-40 kg. It is as difficult to carry as an 18 kg large wooden box.

For most things encumberance does equal weight, the exception is worn items (armour and clothing).

A guy wouldn't weigh any more than 90-100kg,

When I was my fittest I was well over 150 kg. These days as an old fat bastard I'm a bit heavier, but a lot fatter. If you're looking for 7 foot tall heavyworlders, then 200 kg is not out of the question.

If you want you can also back engineer battledress to make human-powered battledress. The rules are in one of the TA's. The main problem is speed.

<checking designs folder>

I thought I'd done this before.

TL14 Unpowered Battle Dress.
VL Creds
+130 130 Chasis
110 275 Manned Controls
0 2600 TL14 Chameleon
14.3 3128.7 AR10 TL14 Armour
0 0 Muscle Power Plant (12 Str = 0.13 EP)
5.46 585 Legs 0.13 EP required Max Speed 15, Offroad 7.5

0.24 0 Cargo Space

0 6718.7 Total Cost

Agility is 0 until the users strength is greater then 17, in which case it can reach 1 for short periods of time. With strength less then 12 you can still operated the battledress, just at a hustle or run to generate enough EP, which means not for very long.

Lumbering movement. With Ag 0 it takes 30 seconds to accelerate to 7.5 km/hour.

Note that this has no "extra features" that you would expect in normal BD. They get quite hard to do without a reciprocal generation system and a battery to power them. Jogging on the spot to keep the NBC system working doesn't sound like fun.

 

[tjoneslo]

Originally posted by stofsk:
Battledress is 300vl according to THB, and I'm not sure what the conversion is between vl and kg, but I doubt it would make all that much difference as they're no so large as to treat it like a vehicle and thus take away the first five dice in combat. So help me understand why this is so.

The rule for -5 dice as a vehicle is a scaling simplification. A small handgun really isn't going to do any significant damage to a car or a truck. A larger handgun might, but only if user gets lucky. And a handgun will not do any damage to something as large and well armored as a starship.

Now in terms of game rules, the question becomes how complex a rule do you want in simulating this reality. Hunter chose a simple option (3 breaks) partly because the weapon vs. armor rule was complex enough as it was. The problem with this kind of simplification is you end up with weird edge cases, like the battledress.

If you search through the archives on either of the T20 formuns, this question has come up before. And a proposed solution, if you don't mind more complexity, is to make the vehicle modifier in relation to the size: -2 dice for each size above Medium. So a large (-2), Huge (-4), Gigantic (-6)... Now battledress is -2 dice for size, most vehicles are huge which is -4, and startships are -8/-10 up to the dreadnaughts at -14/-16.

To go along with this I would up the weapon modifiers as well: human weapons +0, vehicle weapons +5, Turret weapons +10, Bay weapons +15, Spinal Mounts +20. This will let you rescale the bay and spinal mount weapon damage to something reasonable, while making the difference between them very apparent.

 

[princelian]

BD is powered armor as in Starship Troopers, the Gamma World RPG, etc. I don't think it's as big (or as tough) as Clan Elemental armor in BattleTech. (Incidentally, an Elemental can only "shrug off" small 'Mech weaponry; a PPC would smear it all over the landscape.)

IMTU, a suit of Imperial BD (the best around, mostly) is 3 meters tall and 2 meters wide and is as tough to penetrate as a tank. (Note that the suit is both harder to destroy than a tank (more density of armor and fewer vulnerable points) and easier to destroy than a tank (not NEARLY as much mass to absorb punishment.)

In CT, BD doubled your physical stats, which were your hit points. Plus, IIRC, BD had some pretty hefty to-hit modifiers in CT, so it was hard to even hit a BD trooper.

 

[veltyen]

Don't Clan Elementals have 11 hits? In that case they can laugh off PPC's. Its a high pitched hysterical "I'm Alive!!!!" laughter, but laughter none the less.

Of course PPC's are roughly equivalent to a ship scale particle accelerator turret.

IMTU support dress (500-1000 vl) is closer to an elemental, whereas BD is somewhat smaller.

Alternative Scaling

0 Human or smaller (up to 150 vl, 0.1 dTon)
2 Small Vehicle (up to 1500 vl, 1 dTon)
4 Medium Vehicle (up to 15000 vl, 10 dTon)
6 Heavy Vehicle/Smallcraft (up to 150,000 vl, 100 dTon)
8 Super Heavy Vehicle/Small Spaceship (up to 1,500,000 vl, 1000 dTon)
10 Destroyer Class Spaceship (up to 10 kdTon)
12 Cruiser Class (up to 100 kdTon)
14 Battleship class (up to 1MdTon)
16 Super Dreadnaught class (up to 10MdTon)

Weapons still scale at 0,5,10. The minor exception is Spinal weapons, which do USP (max 16) dice of damage after both scaling and armour. This does make high end PA spinals the king of battle, closely followed by Meson spinals.

 

[far-trader]

Originally posted by princelian:
...In CT, BD doubled your physical stats, which were your hit points. Plus, IIRC, BD had some pretty hefty to-hit modifiers in CT, so it was hard to even hit a BD trooper.

Hmm, that wasn't quite the way I remembered it so I had to check who was house ruling

Looks like it's you.

Book 1: "The individual wearing battle dress is effectively doubled in strength and given unlimited endurance (for lifting, carrying, and fighting purposes; not for wounds received)..."

And in CT it is hard to hit BD but not impossible with personal weapons. In CT the weapon of choice when facing BD is a scoped AR at long range for a basic total of +2 to hit. Not bad at all, and the damage is fair. The mods to hit vs BD are the same as CA, it is in fact just "an advanced and powered version of combat armor."

Of course that has all changed with each new edition and a new vision

And T20 bears little or no resemblence to the CT version, sadly so imo, but we're off topic a bit. Anyway PCs aren't supposed to be getting BD right? At least not easily, and always with a catch

 

[stofsk]

Honestly, I like the idea that battledress is a better version of combat armour, or a TL13 combat armour, with some peripherals attached - rather than as some hardcore POWER ARMOUR that would give Heinlein wetdreams.

 

[far-trader]

Something else I don't get about T20 BD... why the heck does it need 72 hours of endurance? Are BD troops really expecting to be deployed and stuck in the suit for 3 whole days and nights?!

Anyway, I redesigned it for mtu in T20 some time back. Basically it's armour, not a vehicle, it runs on batteries for low signature, and has an endurance of a few hours. More than enough for most missions, and if you need more there are backpack units that plug in for extra capabilities, endurance being just one. I think it's closer to the CT version and just what you're looking for stofsk. Once things are settled down around here I'll have to hunt up my versions, unless I posted them somewhere on these forums. See if a search for "Dragon" (the class name iirc) and COTI #288 turns anything up

(I can only think of one or two other times I've typed "Dragon" here

I'd look myself but I have to hit the sack for an early start tomorrow for a week working away from home. See ya starside...

 

[Valarian]

Read David Weber/John Ringo March Upcountry and you soon see how important endurance is for Battledress.

 

[veltyen]

Endurance is fine to get rid of, until something goes wrong. That would never happen in a warzone.

 

[Anthony]

Like anything else, endurance is a tradeoff; if you increase endurance, something else suffers. You want at least enough endurance to accomplish your regular mission; any extra is nice to have, but you always have to ask yourself whether whatever else you could do with the same amount of weight and cost would be more useful than the extra endurance.

 

[mike wightman]

There are three places I look for inspiration for Traveller battle dress:
Starship Troopers (book only)
The Forever War
Rimrunners (part of C.J. Cherrry's Alliance novel series)
In each, suit endurance is pretty important. The various drugs and antidotes can make the wearer's time within the suit slightly more bearable.

But why not have remotely operated battle dress and not risk the man...

 

[Jamus]

Why remote when you could just as well build AI warbots like terminator.

IMO CA is superior for the same reasons that BA tries to fix.

Endurance.. depends on muscle power food/water supply and maybe oxygen bottles.
Low heat output
Easily repaired in the field.
low to no upkeep

As with most things the infantry job is best done low tech. K.I.S.S. imo

Soldiers in CA with ACRs and LMGs with the odd AT PGMP for hard targets should get the job done as well as BA troops and do it cheaper with less logistics used.

IMO

 

[Anthony]

The reason for humans wearing battledress is that, well, Traveller is a role playing game, and getting your robot drone remote shot up just doesn't have the impact of getting your PC shot up.

 

[stofsk]

The question I asked was 'why is BD considered a vehicle?' not why isn't it a robot. But now that someone has broached that subject, I'd like to point out how robots are also considered vehicles.

 

[Jamus]

only the author/designer can answer that question.

 

[stofsk]

Originally posted by Jamus:
only the author/designer can answer that question.

Hunter's position on those sorts of questions can be found in his sig, I wasn't asking it to get clarification from 'up top', but to discuss ideas and possibilities.

 

[Jamus]

I personally dont think power armor should be treated like a vehicle unless it is larger than a bulky suit like a mech or some such. that is my opinion on the matter. that said the question is why is PA considered a vehicle. only the person that wrote the rules can offer a definitive answer.

 

[Libris]

Although the granularity of T20 doesn't work very well for stuff on the borderline of combat scales it does actaully convey the fundamental difference that battledress equiped troops make. Still, even if you don't consider it a vehicle TL13 BD will have an AR13 and an AC of 29 - if it doesn't, you haven't designed it right!