Atgxtg

Not really. Go take a lotk at the info on armor penetration formulas. Or all the ballistics formulas and data out there. Its a very complex subject. It all comes down to what degree of detail you want, and how much error you can accept and where. I did up the table to try and fit the data points given in BRP and to make something compatible with it. Anything with more detail accuracy would require throwing out the data in the book. Thats okay for something down the road, but I'd like to at least wait for the book to come out and read it before doing any sort of rewrite.

I worked my magic, but I'm a little low on POW right now. So don't expect to see results for about two years. Hey, just look at BRP. For all practical purposes this line has been dead for decades. CoC wasn't doing to bad, but RQ, various editions of SB, Pendragon, and all the other games were long gone. A good chunk of the people here are RQ players and that game was dead a long time. Some would say it still is. Now all are back in some form. I'll admit that I don't like the MRQ line, but it does keep the name on the shelf and thus alive. Pendragon still rocks. You still in shell shock. We all go through it the first time we see an RPG that we like go up in a puff of smoke. I felt a pang a few months back when FASA went belly up, and I haven't bought anything from them since their Star Trek line died off in the 80s. You'll get used to it. You still have what you have bought already, and can still run to you heart's content.

Oh yeah! Thanks to PDF's I was able to track down the one Flashing Blades supplement I didn't have. FGU, among others has returned from the grave thanks to PDFs. In the long run, I suspect just about every RPG that isn't tied to a lisenced setting will be brought back eventually. No reason not to.

Yes it does, but it isn't so bad as it looks. I found out in the mid 80s when the Bond RPG died out due to lisencing issues. My solution was to pick up a few extra copies to have on hand for backups. It really doesn't matter much if a game is out of print if you like it and play it. It just means that there is no more support. At least officially. Now, thanks to the internet and desktop publishing, many RPGs get some excellent fan made support. For instance there is a "fake" From Russia With Love supplement for Bond and a few on-line Q Manual 2's. I did up a bunch of stuff for the game myself. So it's not all black and darkness. And recently a few RPGs have come back from the dead.

Well after TSR going under and being bought up by WotC, it is safe to relize to RPB is safe. But they never have been. Virtually every RPG company out there has gone broke at one time or another, and RPGs were fading fast in the old days. In fact, faster than today, that's to things like PDFs, print of demand, and desktop publishing bring the operating costs down. About 90% of my favorite RPGs are no longer in print. And it has been that way for close to 20 years. So I don't think games lines are any less secure now than 20-30 tears ago.

That is a good part of it. Different people have different goals and different expectations. I suspect there is also a difference in level of detail desired. But it can all be turned around. For instance, Fantasy doesn't need multiple gods, magic or non-human races either. or does it need detailed cult write-ups in the RQ2 mold. But all those things have benefits in play so players end up deciding what trade offs to make for the detail. Same with Sci-Fi. A lot of the detail adds color to the setting, and other bits are actually useful for adventure design and for building a setting. Much the way georgrpahy makes a difference in a fantasy or historical setting. Things like how far you can travel and how fast make a big difference to any campaign setting. For instance in Star Wars a ship can fly across the Galaxy in a few days. Sort of like Early-mid 20th Centruy Earth. Star Trek, on the other hand has much slower ships, and it takes days or weeks just to make the next star system. More like Earth's Age of Sail. Just that one difference alone makes for a big difference between the settings.

No, I'm saying that the distribution of the actual bullet doesn't match up to the distribution of a dice. For instance with a 6D10 roll there we have an average of 33 and it can vary by +27 points either way. The actual curve of a bullet is probably a lot narrower. But the "damage" effect on a person does vary widely. Realistically the penetration values for firearms shouldn't vary much, since each round has approximately the same mass and energy. It is just where that energy is being concentrated that makes the big difference. And the effects of armor are not lineal either. Two inches of armor is more than twice as tough to get though that one inch.

Probably not, although I'd have to check his book. Several people do fire such weapons on the firing range. And manuals generally are more of a "quick and dirty results" than good testing. For instance, if these values are all from single shots, then they are not statistically significant. Also we don't have any data on the age of the ammo.

It is even more complex than that. It is different weapons have different penetration and damage ratings at differernt ranges, and it varies by material. And thats with out going into different loads. Since each bullet looses velocity at a different rate, and there is a variance from weapon to weapon, only a certain degree of accuracy is possible. If fact it is so complex and has so may variables that there really isn't a all in one formula for tank gun penetration. All the formulas are innaccurate, or only work under limited conditions. That why they do testing. Materials soak damage much better if the attack is slow as well. That is why leather and maille are effective against swords but no so effective against bullets. A 9.mm pistol round isn't doing much more damage that a broadsword, or have more energy. It just dumps it all in a smaller area. Against people the ideal penetration range seems to be about 12" of flesh. Deep enough to reach some major organs and dump all thier energy. I'm not opposed to doing things differently. In fact, overall, I'm not too keen on the values in BRP. Aps are so low that any heavy weapon can damage a tank, so some WWII tanks will kill a M1 at range, just that it will take two or three hits more. But my goal here was to come up with a system that matches up with the values given in BRP. There are quite a few other ways to tackle this, and I'm am planning on trying one somewhere down the road.

I'll disagree. Star Wars and Star Trek both put quite a bit into worlds like Tatooine and Vulcan. THe key thing to consider here is that on TV and espeically in a Movie they can have a "touch & go", where the ship stops for a bit, and never comes back. In a RPG, there is always the possiblity that the characters might want to go to planet C and hang around awhile. Basically a Planet is the same as a city, kingdom or region in a fantasy setting, and needs to be detailed just as much. It is just the scale is bigger. Rather than a bunch of island countries you have a bunch of planets.

1) I do have some sources for the penetration of concrete. So far all, you've brought up was Gary's. No, not statistically. For instance, there is a certain amount of armor that a .50 cal will always penetrate at a certain range. Same with rifles and pistols. So if you set the minimum die roll so that you would get this vaule, it ends up messing the results against people. If we did a wide range, liner progression you end up with the rifles doing so much damage that it becomes an autokill. Take a look at Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes. It uses a linear damage formula, and since a typical rifle has several times the energy of a typical pistol it does so much damage that it simply will characters outright. That isn't how wounding works. A 5.56 bullet has over four ties the energy of a 9mm bullet, but the mortality rates between the two are not at the same ratio. Yes and you have failed to grasp the effects that has on characters. If a .45ACP can kill and is doing 1D10+2 and we have a 7.62 with six times the energy, and 13 times the energy/area, and have it do 6D10+12 or 13D10+26, it's wrong. Not with a fixed hit point system. BRP just doesn't handle location effects to a fine enough degree of detail. for that to work. As I said before, it isn't "bang your dead". That is why the numbers wounded are so much higher than the numbers killed. They will perform with 3 standard deviations of the norm over 96% of the time. But the norm for the actual bullet and the norm for the die roll are two different things. For instance a standard deviation for 6D10 is over 7 points. So 1 standard deviation is a 14 point range. That is what will come up 8% of the time and to match that up with real weapon data we would need enough of a sampling for penetration data to get the actual spread of the real weapon. And still do. Even expressing intermediate rounds is meaningless if the game effect is the same. And a linear progression will have that effect pretty quick in BRP. The difference in pistol performance would be enough to hit an autokill zone. And, of course there is the idea of doing this for BRP, not writing a new game system to support it. And signficantly altering the firearms data would mean altering the melee weapons too.

[Quute=John Paul] Do you have a cite for that figure for cement? I can’t find anything on cement alone. The Army manuals always reference concrete. I don’t know if they know there is a difference or if ‘concrete’ is supposed to cover both. I agree that the rebar makes a heck of a difference. I threw it in for completeness and to show that it is expected to be breached with concentrated, close range fire running into the hundreds of rounds. It sets an upper bound on what can be achieved.

Being on the internet doesn't make information correct though. Especially official US Army documents. Generally the Army is very conservative about their performance data. So all all the armed services. According to Gary's a M1 tank is limited to 45mph. According to most experts and tank crews expect to hit 60. I'm not impugning you source, just your claim that the "Army" disagrees with me. You made it sound as if the US Army stopped by, looked at the data and went "nope, no way." Instead you looked at one source, took their data as gospel and then presented it as if you had an Army's to back up your judgment.

ohn Paul, Look at the data provided @ Gary's: [table] Range| Homogeneous Plate| Face Hardened Plate|Sand|Clay|Concrete 200m|25.4mm|22.9mm|355.6mm|711.2mm|50.8mm 600m|17.6mm|12.7mm|304.8mm|685.8mm|25.4mm 1500m|7.6mm|5.1mm|152.4mm|533.4mm|25.4mm[/table] Now if the energy from a .50 cal drops off between 600m and 1500m (and it does) then the penetration for concrete should drop off. But it doesn't. The bullet penetrates just as deep into concrete at 1500m as at 600m, and that is all that the table covers, penetration. And the penetration value against concrete does drop off according to the test.

I just thought the idea of a review was to give a description and evaluation of something. I mean if a game sucks but the reviewer writes the most engrossing story about his page turning experiences should be go out and buy the RPG? It's a review, not Shakespear. "Is this A Dagger I see before me on the weapons table? Or is it a dirk? Wherefore are thou a Dagger? Does it hath a lower STR min? Is it nobler in the mind of the GM for PCs to sufferer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or spent POW points..."

I was just thinking that we could use modifed stuff for some of our maps. THe Mons Olympus photo above seems goot to me for Sun Mnt. With CC2 you could importa part of the mountain and use as a bit map for some close up shots. On top of it you could add Rurik's house, a bunch of sun worshippers, a city. Even a notional 27km should be plenty if the 'earth' is flat, or slightly bowl-shaped... I have visions of cultists watching the sunset much like Times Square on New Year's Eve. Speaking of years, we should probably have some event to differentiate years. Perhaps one day a year the sun sleeps in and lets his son (perhaps a comet/shooting star) do the job?

You incredibly brilliant forgspawner, you. That would be Mons Olympus, 24-27km high and 550km across. And, quite swipe-able for Sun Mountain. In fact, if we were to take some non-Earth landscapes, and just add water...

A brighter star could support life out to a farther distance. If we really wanted a bigger Dyson Sphere it could be done. We could also have a smaller sphere if the sun is dimmer. Just don't tell Rurik the sun in dim.

I was aware of the scaling. It was my favorite CC2 feature. I just didn't know about the quality of CC3. Thanks. Ah. In that case, maybe we should make it 93 million miles high! :eek: But then I guess we'd have to call it space mountain, and that might require an arrangement with Disney. :D

. I know we have moved away from the Sci-Fi concept, but just how big is 'Sky Mountain supposed to be?" At 250 miles high, it is within the orbit of Earth's International Space Station. Do we want it that high? What is supposed to be up there?

Well it possible to get a good map with something like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop. Or even to alter a screen cap to add more to it. I haven't used CC3, but CC2 was somewhat limited. Taking a screen cap will let us modify things a bit more. Maybe cut and past some coastline here and there to alter it and make it unique.

Thanks for the detailed feedback. It helps me adjust the values. I built this on a couple of dozen examples so every new vehicles is another test case. I'd suggest raising the vehicle hit point bonus by a flat amount, that way you will still have variance by type. For instance if standard subs are +100 hit points, and your want you future subs to have a bit more, give them +150 HP and use the SIZ chart. A couple of us have thought about this earlier, for SPACE: 1999. What we came up with was something along the lines of the the old James Bond RPG where tech adds a bonus to the character skill chance rather than work on it's own. So a computer could give +10% or +20% to someone's math skill or some such for a problem. That way it is always the PC who solve the problem and not the stuff they brought along with them. For something that can perform some task on it's own, we thought of using twice the bonus as the skill for something like an autopilot. So if a high tech computer assisted craft adds +20% to Handling, then it would have a skill of 40%. That is just the idea that we came up with. Like all my mods it's nothing official, just an idea. Okay, I got a "official reviewer" if I decide to go pro. Hope my future work doesn't suck.:eek: