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My solution to the vehicle damage issue

Josh77

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I've been thinking on ways to make heavy vehicles more vulnerable, and to make light vehicles a little more durable all at the same time.Here is the house rule I came up with.

When a vehicle takes damage, divide the total damage that penetrated the armor by 10 rounded up. Roll that many d6. If any d6 comes up as a “6”, a critical hit has occurred. The severity of the critical hit is equal to the penetrating damage divided by 10 rounded up. These critical hits are in addition to any due to rolling 6 or more effect.
When a vehicle reaches zero hull points, any excess damage inflicted is an automatic critical hit, with the normal severity of damage divided by 10. Any time a “hull” result is rolled or inflicted from a different critical result, instead of taking regular hull damage (which is already at 0), roll the number of d6 indicated by the hull result. If any of those dice result in a “6”, the vehicle is wrecked. Otherwise, the vehicle is still repairable and functional as far as its current critical damage will allow.

This might slow down combat just a hair, but I think it works for me. Let me know what you all think!

Edit: This is for MgT 2E
 
As a change to what I posted above, when a vehicle takes damage, roll a number of d6 equal to the damage inflicted on the vehicle divided by 10 (rounded up). If any of those d6 are a "6", a critical hit has resulted. The severity is equal to the number of 6's rolled.

Here is an example of how this would all work.

Let's say a predator ambush hunter tank fires a burst with it's heavy gauss cannon on a rakatama g/carrier, and scores a hit on the side armor. The predator's heavy gauss cannon does 2DD damage and has AP 15 and Auto 2. damage rolled is a 5 and a 4, for a total of 11 with auto fire, or 110 damage points. the g/carrier's side armor is 100, which when the cannon's AP value is applied is reduced to 85. This results in 25 points of hull damage on the g/carrier. now 3d6 is rolled to check for a critical hit (25 divided by 10 rounded up). a 2,6, and 6 are rolled, resulting in a severity 2 critical hit!

Now, for the other end of the spectrum, flimsy vehicles.
Lets say a ground car is fired on by a traveller armed with an assault rifle, firing a burst. The shooter hits with 4 points of effect, and rolls a 3,5, and 6 for damage. This results in 20 points of damage (3+5+6+4 for effect and +2 for burst fire). Normally this would completely destroy the car, as it has armor of 2 and 12 points of hull. But, instead, with this house rule hull would be reduced to zero as normal, but instead of being wrecked it would suffer an automatic critical hit with severity equal to damage that penetrated armor divided by 10 rounded up. In this case, that would be a severity 2 critical hit (18 divided by 10, rounded up).
If the critical hit results in "hull" damage, instead of rolling the indicated further hull damage, roll that number of d6 instead, and if any of those dice come up as "6", the vehicle is wrecked. Otherwise, it is still in the fight.
So, in the example above, if the severity 2 hit resulted in a hull hit, instead of following what the table says (vehicle suffers 2d damage), instead those 2d would be rolled, and if any came up as a 6, the car would be destroyed.

anyways, I hope this clears it up if there was any confusion. It's worked great for us, making heavy vehicles less of an invincible block of metal death, and making light vehicles less paper like. Heavy weapons will still annihilate light vehicles pretty quickly, but hand weapons, pistols and other small arms won't be able to.
 
In the Real World, a penetrating hit on a tank generally kills the tank, unless things get quite bizarre. A very high velocity projectile hitting the side of an Armored Personnel Carrier might be a straight through and through hit, with little damage to the Carrier. Anybody in the way of the projectile is not going to have a little damage though, as a through and through hit on a person by a tank gun is generally going to be fatal.

Remember, when the projectile penetrates, it arrives on the other side of the interceding armor with some velocity, which generally means that it bounces around inside of the tank. A chunk of metal bouncing around inside of a tank normally is not good news for the tank crew or anything inside of the armor.

Edit Note: Thank you for your service.
 
yeah, I agree. That’s why I think there should be greater chance of something vital being hit, including a chance for crew to be hit, but without slowing the game down too much or changing the rules too radically. I think this is a good compromise.

And thanks, but I need to update my profile. I just retired in April, and I am in Maine now, not Killeen.
 
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