If you've seen the latest Pyramid (#3/96 - Tech and Toys IV) you'll know that unfortunately for me, Pulver has beaten me to the punch! I was working on something a little more extensive than his materials, trying to generalise his more-detailed approach to TL9 armours up to TL12. That post isn't quite ready yet, since I still have some fiddling and noodling to do with some values of them, so instead I thought I'd do a quick test/review of Ultra-Tech Armour Design by building a few armours with it.
Full Harness (TL10): An articulated suit of plate armour made from nanocomposite plates, covering the wearer's torso, arms and legs.
Nanolaminate Clamshell (TL10): A plate-armour cuirass made from moulded and sloping plates of advanced nanolaminates, capable of resisting small shaped-charge rounds.
Nanoscale Cuirass (TL10): A cuirass made from small platelets of nanocomposite polymer material, interlocking in a pattern based on pangolin scales.
Nanoweave Ballistic Vest (TL10): A tough, non-concealable ballistic vest made from thick nanoweave. Solid nanocomposite plate inserts provide additional protection to the vitals.
Superconducting Clamshell (TL11): A very light diamondoid plate cuirass backed with superconducting electromagnetic armour. Its main use is against plasma bolts and it can easily stop all but the heaviest of plasma weapons.
| TL | Armour |
Location
| DR | Cost | Weight | LC | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
10
10 10 10 10 10 10 11 |
Full Harness, Light
Full Harness, Heavy Nanolaminate Clamshell, Light Nanolaminate Clamshell, Heavy Nanoscale Cuirass Nanoweave Ballistic Vest trauma plates Superconducting Clamshell |
torso, arms, legs
torso, arms, legs
torso
torso
torso
torso
vitals
torso
|
30
40 45 60 30 30/10* +40 200/10 |
$2,550
$3,400
$3,000
$4,000
$750
$1,200
$160
$1,050
|
34
46 10.1 13.5 18.5 4 3.2 15 |
2
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 | [1] [1] [2] [3] |
[1] Laminate armour; double DR vs. shaped-charge warheads or plasma bolts.
[2] Split DR; provides full protection against piercing and cutting attacks only.
[3] Split DR; provides full protection against shaped-charge warheads and plasma bolts only. Two C cells included in the weight provide 42 uses. Once the power is depleted, use the lower DR against all attacks.
Post-Mortem
Pulver's armour design system is one of my favourite parts of Pyramid magazine because I love being able to stat out and build my own things. That said, I have two problems with this expansion to it. The first is the lack of variety; the Cutting Edge article had more variety within a single TL than the entirety of this article. I'd like a few more options with their own pros and cons. The second issue is that recreations of armour from GURPS Ultra-Tech end up heavier and more expensive. The flexible armours aren't so bad – the system typically adds a pound or so of weight and a few hundred dollars – but the rigid armour suffers from about 2/3 as much DR for higher weight and worse costs. This also happened in Cutting Edge so I wonder if this is by design – one complaint of GURPS Ultra-Tech was the absurdly cheap clamshell armour.
After playing with electromagnetic armour a bit I'm convinced that there's an error in the calculation for number of uses. The formula given increases numbers of uses by TL but also increases the number of uses with DR. Higher DR giving more uses doesn't make sense. My guess is that the formula was supposed to divide by the electromagnetic DR, not multiply. I've used that correction in the superconducting clamshell above, otherwise you'd get 760,000 uses out of a single C cell!
I'd also be interested in seeing if I can find some numbers to represent a kind of "electromagnetic cloth" armour, like a flexible cloth version of electromagnetic armour. It'd only really be useful for superscience settings with plasma weapons but it'd be an interesting addition.
Post-Mortem
Pulver's armour design system is one of my favourite parts of Pyramid magazine because I love being able to stat out and build my own things. That said, I have two problems with this expansion to it. The first is the lack of variety; the Cutting Edge article had more variety within a single TL than the entirety of this article. I'd like a few more options with their own pros and cons. The second issue is that recreations of armour from GURPS Ultra-Tech end up heavier and more expensive. The flexible armours aren't so bad – the system typically adds a pound or so of weight and a few hundred dollars – but the rigid armour suffers from about 2/3 as much DR for higher weight and worse costs. This also happened in Cutting Edge so I wonder if this is by design – one complaint of GURPS Ultra-Tech was the absurdly cheap clamshell armour.
After playing with electromagnetic armour a bit I'm convinced that there's an error in the calculation for number of uses. The formula given increases numbers of uses by TL but also increases the number of uses with DR. Higher DR giving more uses doesn't make sense. My guess is that the formula was supposed to divide by the electromagnetic DR, not multiply. I've used that correction in the superconducting clamshell above, otherwise you'd get 760,000 uses out of a single C cell!
I'd also be interested in seeing if I can find some numbers to represent a kind of "electromagnetic cloth" armour, like a flexible cloth version of electromagnetic armour. It'd only really be useful for superscience settings with plasma weapons but it'd be an interesting addition.
Because your the first person I've seen talking about this (and I'm also somebody who had a lot of fun with Cutting Edge), I do have a couple of questions about how you think two of the rules from Ultra-Tech Armour work and you are obviously somebody who's thought a lot about these systems.
ReplyDeleteIn Cutting Edge the IR stealth was $30 / sq.ft for TL-6. In Ultra-Tech it's $75 and _3 lb. per sq.ft_ for better protection, so for a full suit that's almost 58 lb. by itself. To make it more odd, the example suit apparently has IR stealth, but the example costs it at the Cutting Edge design.
So yeah, do you think that's just a massive errata or what? I mean I can understand IR stealth adding _some_ weight, but that much?
Also, what do you think the TL is for the ELSS? It gives stats for TL9 performance, but then gives the cost as TL10 and up.
My other main issues with it is that it would be really good to have a TL9 laminate or some other way of getting better radiation protection before TL10 (most of the stuff I've been designing is designed for actual space so radiation protection is kinda useful).
Oh, and for the love of god, it would have been nice to have a TL9 transparent armour option for visors with a Max DR better than 5. I really want to know what the TL9 armours in the main Ultra-Tech book are using for their visors, because it's not anything out of these systems. I find myself either cheating or having to go for sensor helmets just so I'm not building something that's wide open to 'shoot me in the face' attacks.
I will say though, having proper rules for space suits, filter systems, air tanks, and all that other fun stuff is great. I'd been guessing up to now based on the space suits from UT.
All in all I really like this, but it does have a few oddities. And if building stuff like the heavy clamshell from UT is out, at least I seem to be able to build soft TL9 armour that isn't worse than the TL8 stuff from High Tech (though from what I've heard on the forums that was optimistic on coverage).
(oh, and if the blog address means what I'm assuming it means, hello fellow Kiwi!)
Cripes, I think my reply was almost as long as your post. Sorry about that.
DeleteThere's a lot of stuff to reply to but I'll do my best!
DeleteThe IR stealth took me a second but I think it's just phrased badly. I think it means "$75 per square foot, plus an extra 3lbs of weight". I.e. you pay per surface area but the additional weight is 3lbs for the entire suit. This fits in with the Infrared Cloaking on p. 99 of Ultra-Tech, which is $1,500 and 3lbs.
Also of note is that if you take that $1,500 figure for a full suit from UT and divide it by the $75/sqft figure from the article to find its surface area, you get 20 square feet. That's around a full-coverage suit. This makes me even more sure that it's a static 3lbs.
I think the ELSS is a typo; the LSS is given stats for TL9, then the ELSS has prices given only for TL10 and TL11+. My guess is that it should read:
"Multiply operating air and water duration by 10 at TL10 or by 60 at TL11+. The system is 5 lbs. and $10,000 at TL10; halve this at TL11+."
That puts the duration and cost/weight multipliers in line with each other and the LSS.
With regards to the transparent armour, there is an option! The advanced polymer nanocomposite has a T in its notes field, so it can be made transparent for double cost. But that feels like a bit of a cop-out. My preference would be to use something like the current materials based on synthetic spinel or sapphire, or aluminium oxynitride, that are being tested as transparent armouring materials. Given the real world is teetering at the brink of TL9, I don't think it's a massive leap to assume some variety of these materials gets used for rigid transparent armour by TL9, with the appropriate upgrade of "just stick some nanotubes in it" at TL10.
The materials I have in the works use the Ultra-Tech armours, with some reverse-engineering of Pulver's equations from these articles. His work is pretty useful in this regard. For example, the armoured visors: they give you DR, coverage, weight and cost, literally everything you need to determine the material's WM and CM. Now that he's released this article, however, I'm probably going to make some edits to the CM to make them not so absurdly cheap. Either that, or some changes in assumptions. For example, the 18-pound clamshell with 60 DR is a little less ridiculous if it's made from semi-ablative ceramic plates.
Overall, I enjoyed the article but I don't feel like it gave me enough of what I wanted. But I never read the bits about accessories before you mentioned the ELSS and had no idea it basically had rules for building spacesuits! I'm going to have to look at that in more detail now.
Oh crap, I didn't even notice that typo. IR and actual Stealth should weigh 0.4lbs/ft^2. 3lbs seems to be the weight of a stealth system that roughly covers the torso.
DeleteIf you take a look at the chameleon net it weighs 40lbs and covers 75ft^2, that's about 0.53lbs/ft^3 and a 7ft^2 area would weigh about 3.7lbs which is pretty close close to the 4lbs weight of the normal chameleon surface system.