High Guard armor

[Carlobrand]

There are times when I feel really stupid. Contemplating the different way High Guard and MegaTraveller handle armor, with High Guard using simple percentages while MegaTrav measures thickness, when - after literally a couple of decades playing around with Hugh Guard and never giving it a second thought - it occurred to me that High Guard doesn't consider the square cube law with respect to armor.

Which is to say:

Take a 100 dT spacecraft and put 2% of its hull in armor. Now increase all dimensions of that spacecraft by 10 while maintaining its shape: it's ten times as long, ten times as wide, ten times as tall, and now comes in at 100,000 dTons. And, its armor is ten times as thick.

So I thought, OK, simple mechanic: take the High Guard Target Size DM, double it, apply it as a DM to the High Guard damage roll. Doubling it gives you, very roughly, the same result that increased armor thickness resulting from a square-cube application would, and it has the advantage of being easy to remember and apply. Makes big ships harder to damage, makes little ships easier to damage.

 

[flykiller]

simple mechanic

that is simple. perhaps simplistic, kinda like jumping half-way into a pool. when one starts playing around with hg2 percentages one immediately devolves into construction details, ship aspects, localized armor, fuel tank placement, et infinitum. it's suddenly quite involved, more than most people care for. I once posted a thread attemping to implement that and received not one response.

 

[kilemall]

ACS ships already explode easy given the critical hit to weapon code rule.

I always took the percentage of hull space for armor to mean it still works out to the same thickness for a larger craft.

So yes the 100,000 ton ship with 2% to armor means a whole LOT more armor in terms of raw tonnage, but it also means a lot more area to cover. Arguably, it should be thinner.

 

[infojunky]

Take a 100 dT spacecraft and put 2% of its hull in armor. Now increase all dimensions of that spacecraft by 10 while maintaining its shape: it's ten times as long, ten times as wide, ten times as tall, and now comes in at 100,000 dTons. And, its armor is ten times as thick.

Just a quick note each increment of external diminutions increases the volume by 8.

 

[Timerover51]

Take a 100 dT spacecraft and put 2% of its hull in armor. Now increase all dimensions of that spacecraft by 10 while maintaining its shape: it's ten times as long, ten times as wide, ten times as tall, and now comes in at 100,000 dTons. And, its armor is ten times as thick.

If you increase the exterior dimensions by 100, which is what you would be doing, and increase armor thickness by 10, you have increased the armor mass by 1000. If you are paying for the armor by weight or mass, you have increased your cost by 1000 as well.

 

[McPerth]

And when you're applying as percentage, that's what you get...

To keep with Carloband example, if your 100 dtons ship uses 2% , it uses 2 dtons for it. If you multiply all dimensions by 10, you'll get (as he says) a 100000 dton ship, if you keep the 2% of it as armor will be 2000 dtons, so 1000 times that of the 100 dtons ship.

But here you forget something. If you increase all dimensión by a factor of 10, the ship surface only increases by a factor of 100, so if the armor increases by a factor of 1000, the real effect would be either thicker armor (by a factor of 10, again as carlo says) or (as canon says) more internal bracing and other strenght features.

Example: we have a cube whip 10 m in side. It is 1000 m³ and a totañ surface of 600 m² (6 sides, 100 m² each). If the ship is 100 m in side (increased by a factor of 10), its volume is 1000000 m³, but each side would be 10000 m², so total surface would be 60000 m². The volume has increased by a factor of 1000, but the surface only by a factor of 100.

 

[Timerover51]

I did not get into the issue of structural strengthening with the significantly thicker hull, as I would have to dig out some of my naval architecture books for that. Doing what Carlobrand described would make for a much different ship internally, regardless of how it looked externally.

 

[Carlobrand]

that is simple. perhaps simplistic...

Well, High Guard is by its nature simplistic.

ACS ships already explode easy given the critical hit to weapon code rule. ...

I'm sorry, my brain's a little sluggish today. ACS?

I did not get into the issue of structural strengthening with the significantly thicker hull, as I would have to dig out some of my naval architecture books for that. Doing what Carlobrand described would make for a much different ship internally, regardless of how it looked externally.

A fair point. The ship presumably has some sort of "skeleton". Part of that 2% includes strengthening the skeleton to support the armor in the hull, but that can't be scaled up linearly - else you could make a 100' giant by just scaling up a human. I should have though of that, but I've been a bit slow of wit lately. Life's been somewhat unpleasant.

Reminds me of an on-line comic I stumbled across, reporter reading the news: "In today's news, a 1000 meter tall lizard creature attacked New York City. Given the enormous weight of the creature, and the fact that the weight and cross sectional area don't scale together linearly, the creature was made almost entirely of legs, which were made almost entirely of bone. Additionally, since nerve impulses travel at about 100 meters per second, the creature was not able to rapidly respond to dangerous stimuli. The creature was thus easily dispatched, then used to make a tasty bone broth. Sources say local people reluctantly thanked science for never letting anything interesting happen."

At the very least, we'd have to tie the hull in strong with the drives or they break free of the massive hull and drive the ship's core into the nose of the hull. So, some portion goes to increasing hull thickness, but some portion goes to strengthening the skeleton to support such an increase.

Applying the DM directly, instead of doubling it, would imply hull thickness has roughly tripled for the ship's dimensions increasing by a factor of 10, which should leave adequate mass to increase structural support to manage the added surface mass since about 2/3 of the increased mass is now inside instead of on the hull surface. Simplistic, but perhaps a little closer to the mark than the first try. Might also be better to start from size 0 and add 1 to armor rating per size class larger rather than subtracting 1 or 2 from little ships and fighters (so 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 instead of -2, -1, 0, 1, 2), since the latter implies in the case of ships with no armor that the hull is thinner. I don't really have a good justification for a small boat or scout/courier having a thinner base hull than a large freighter. The hull is there to stop radiation and micrometeors, after all, and they don't become less of a danger because the ship is smaller.

 

[vegas]

ACS = adventure class ship (read: "small ship")

 

[McPerth]

I'm sorry, my brain's a little sluggish today. ACS?

for what I've read here, in T5 it means Adventure Class Ships, to refer to the small ships adventurers use to own (2000 tons or less, again for what I've read in this board)

 

[aramis]

I'm sorry, my brain's a little sluggish today. ACS?

Adventure Class Ships.

Essentially sub-1000Td

 

[infojunky]

ACS = adventure class ship (read: "small ship")

FASA used Adventure Class Ship to describe their 5000 dton and less ships. So essentially ACS means any ship one could build with book 2, though FASA used High Guard liberally for their designs.