Playbook: Armour Damage Threshold

Long before I started this blog or joined the GURPS Discord, me and Jose of Blogging At Default, Taking Extra Time have regularly bounced ideas back and forth, discussed things and come up with some new rules to handle situations. One of the things we had both run into is that, especially at high TLs, weapons can't keep up with armour, especially not military-grade examples. Someone in a combat hardsuit is all but invincible to any handheld weapons of the same TL. This presents an annoying combat balance problem if other players aren't wearing the same armour, as anything that might seriously threaten the hardsuited character will simply turn the rest of the party into red mist.

So the solution we came up with was a system to gradually degrade the DR of armours, based on the attacks that are hitting it.

Utility Closet: Armour Design Spreadsheet

David Pulver's armour design system is one of my favourite things in GURPS Pyramid, since I'm a perennial tweaker. One of the things that annoys me about it is the fact that it's spread across three publications, requiring flipping between several if you want to make something that uses materials or rules from more than one. To ease the issue, I've collated all the information on body surface areas, constructions and materials into one Google spreadsheet. Enjoy!

Please note that I deliberately didn't include explanations of the numbers or the actual rules themselves, as that would probably count as republishing GURPS content, which is in violation of Steve Jackson Games' online policy.

Eidetic Memory: Ultra-Tech Armour Design... Review

I had recently begun a post here where I updated David Pulver's articles Eidetic Memory: Low-Tech Armour Design and Eidetic Memory: Cutting Edge Armour Design from Pyramid #3/52 and #3/85 to work for TL10 and up, having reverse-engineered armouring materials from the items in GURPS Ultra-Tech.

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.

Equipment Locker: Battlesuit Point Defence

One of the most annoying holes in GURPS Ultra-Tech is the comparison between armour-piercing or shaped charge warheads with both heavy battlesuits and tanks. The DR values given for either of these are woefully inadequate at stopping even the lightest shaped charge or HEMP round. I was reading through the entries for tanks, trying to find some justification for why the main battle tank doesn't have enough DR to stop being ripped to shreds by a shoulder-mounted HEMP round. Then I found it: the tank has a strike laser on the turret for point defence. This makes sense! If you can stop missiles and anti-tank weapons from even hitting you in the first place, you don't need to lug around armour heavy enough to stop the damage. Well, that's all well and good for tanks, but how does that help battlesuits?

As per usual, GURPS Ultra-Tech provides us with the tools to make what we want, it just doesn't put them together for us.