Penetration and Melee...

A thread of 2 messages, 11 April 1994 to 12 April 1994, in the order they were sent.

#7240 Penetration and Melee...

Dane Johnson · 11 April 1994

Greetings, Sophonts!
	An interesting point came up in yesterday's game -- A combat situation
came up on Knorbes in Regina, a TL 2 planet.  Basically, one of the locals
attempted to lop the head off of one of my players.  It was our first
collective foray into the TNE rules (and my first time running combat with
them) and questions invariably arose.  The most pressing is the following:

If armor (Say, for example, Ballistic Weave) with an Armor Value of 1 is
good enough to drop a die of damage off of a pen 1 weapon or completely
negate damage from a pen NIL weapon, why does it only stop 2 points of
sword damage?  A sword does 2d6 damage, average of 7 points of damage,
reduced to 5 points (granted, not much) with the AV 1 armor, while it
will completely stop a 9mm TL6 autopistol with ball ammo.  If anybody
has a good 'realistic' explanation of this phenomenon I've got a player
*eager* to hear it :)

On a similar front, the same guy would like to know if you could wear
a Flak jacket over Ballistic Weave (For the laser protection:)?  I ruled
that it would be *possible*, but that it'd probably be like wearing a ski
jacket over a snowmobile suit.  Any comments?

Sorry to muddy the recent thrust towards more 'setting'-type discussions
with this rules ironmongery, but my group is eager to hear the collected
wisdom of the net on these matters...

Dane
[email removed]           [email removed]

TNS Stringer ------ Terra/Solomani Rim (1827 G867975-8)
"My opinions are those of my fuzz-brained, cat-sniffing Norwegian Elkhound."

#7258 Re: Penetration and Melee...

Bertil Jonell · 12 April 1994 · reply to #7240

> From: Dane Johnson [email removed]
> Subject: Penetration and Melee...

> If armor (Say, for example, Ballistic Weave) with an Armor Value of 1 is
> good enough to drop a die of damage off of a pen 1 weapon or completely
> negate damage from a pen NIL weapon, why does it only stop 2 points of
> sword damage?

  Ballistic weave is notoriously bad at stopping thin penetrating or
shearing attacks like daggers, arrows and swords. Even very small
bullets like .22LR have a tendency to "slip though the net" sometimes.

  Now this only holds for ballistic weave, ie TL6-8 Terran body armour,
not for platemail, combat armour and battle dress, and possibly not even
for low-tech vac suits.

  I suspect this is a relic from T2k2, since T2k2 only concerns itself
with body armour and not platemail, combat armour and battle dress.
But you would still get some impact damage from the actual blow, it
is hard to stop that.

> [email removed]           [email removed]

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