From: merrick@rt66.com (Merrick Burkhardt)
Subject: Armor and PAWs
To: gdw-beta@quark.qrc.com (gdw)
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 18:53:03 -0700 (MST)


Hey,

well, here's the poop on armor vs. PAWs.

For 100,000ton plus ships, AVs of between 500 and 4000 will be common,
varying between 0.6 and 4.6% of hull displacement (for 500,000tons, more
for 100,000tons).

The mass of these armor values is 14 times the 15*disp. rule!, so if a
hull is 4.6% armor, it'll use up 64.4% of its mass allotment!  And
that's at TL14-15.  At TLs 12-13 it'd be *twice* that number.

Let's try an example 500,000 needle hull for a BB.

TL	AV	Vol(tons)	Mass	max._ship_mass
--	----	---------	------	--------------
12	500	5738		1.2E6	7.5E6
14	500	2869		0.6E6	7.5E6
12	1000	11,475		2.4E6	" "
14	1000	5738		1.2E6	7.5E6
12	2000	22,950		4.8E6	" "
14	2000	11,475		2.4E6	" "
14      4000    22,949          4.8E6   " "

A Needle hull has a MVM of 1.3.  Wedge is 1.5.

I'll have to look at the mass costs of the other overhead (jdrive, min
PP for 6gs, etc.).  It looks like ships this big might be able to shrug
off any PAW attack (though the ship above could sport a PAW that'd do
3,600 damage).

As a sample 100,000ton:

TL      AV      Vol(tons)       Mass    max._ship_mass
--      ----    ---------       ------  --------------
12	1000	3914		0.8E6	1.5E6
14	1000	1956		0.4E6	" "
12	2000	7840		1.6E6	over!
14	2000	3914		0.8E6	1.5E6

I bet that we can have a ballpark figure for max armor for each major
hull rating on the FFS chart with some overhead figures for the rest of
the hull (assume 1/2 is fuel, etc.).  I think that doing the damage fix
for PAWs and MGs (DE/hit idea) might be enough.

Actually, if you trash the slop rule (15*disp is max mass) and do all
mdrives based on mass armor would be curtailed a large bit.

-Merrick