Hot damn. So I’m looking at the vehicle rules in the marketplace, and I’ve noticed that if you can stack plated and reinforced (I don’t see any indication otherwise) you could make a class 3 ground vehicle with 8 armour and still have room to spare for a gun.
Not only does this give you the rare chance to roll a pbta move with a +8 (+9 if you could work a data point in), it makes the vehicle ludicrously resilient. Rolling Brace for Impact with +8 means you’ll definitely get at least a 10+ on your roll, and gives you a 5/6 chance of getting a 13+. Because it’s reinforced the tank automatically reduces the severity of damage from anything less than breaching weapons by one stage. Therefore, our supertank will typically reduce the severity of non-breaching attacks by 3 stages, and breaching attacks by 2 (that’s if I’m understanding the description of the Reinforced tag correctly).
This means that the tank will completely shrug off even destructive firearms like grenade launchers without breaking a metaphorical sweat. Heavy weapons like rocket launchers fare a bit better, being typically reduced to minor damage. So a 70mm rocket full of space explosives will still only dent the armour. Bring 5 of them and you might be getting somewhere. Replace the war-heads with shaped explosives (Breaching) and you’ll only need 4.
And then there’s spaceship weapons. These are listed as lethal damage, and I presume they count as breaching since they’re intended to fight other spaceships. As a result, a direct hit from a massive ship mounted laser cannon firing from low orbit will still only do severe damage. It will take 3 hits in total to destroy the supertank. Now because this is a class 3 vehicle we still have room for a turret, in which we could fit a heavy weapon. Let’s give it a class 3 high-velocity cannon with the tags Breaching, Shock, and Detonation being represented by the different types of shells it has available. Breaching allows it to damage a spaceships hull, shock allows it to cause all sorts of malfunctions, and detonation allows it to shred external modules as well as deal with ground threats.
Yes that’s right, what we are making here is a ground vehicle capable of going toe-to-toe with spaceships, for the admittedly expensive cost of two class 3 assets (though make an explorer/military type and you can actually start the game with this tank). The only other downside is that it’s slow, but does this thing sound like it would ever need to run away?
Heavy tank is heavy.
That all sounds about right. I don’t have my copy of UW at hand. The thing that stuck out in my last reading of the vehicle section was that the heaviest weapon a vehicle could mount was the same as a man-portable heavy weapon (MG, rocket launcher, etc.). But adding on all those tags would, and should, fictionally, make it closer to a tank’s main gun.
Yep, that’s absolutely by design. I <3 tanky tank. (The same philosophy allows a character to have a Class 3 Outfit that grants massive protection; Space marine armor).
That said, a Class 3 Vehicle with Class 3 Weapon attached is super expensive to field in force. A Faction outpost might possibly have one or two such Super Tanks (probably with a unique name), and even a full Faction army would field a dozen of these mobile bunkers.
On a character side, you could absolutely make a Military Explorer with the skills to build one. That super tank will be half of the character’s total skills: its very existence will be a defining part of who the character is. They would be “The Tank Girl” or “The Tank Dude”, hired by factions when they need a sledgehammer to assault an enemy base.
I feel like you’re kind of missing the point of Uncharted Worlds, and Apocalypse World games in general. The point isn’t to make yourself mechanically invulnerable because failure is interesting.
Well I don’t see why you couldn’t do it. I mean a heavily armored assault vehicle is a thing seen all the time in fiction so why not. Remember the ATAT walkers in star wars couldn’t be damaged by the snowspeeder weapons but had to have a tow cable trip them.
It just means that when they are encountering opposition it will be other tanks, bombers or quick opponents that disable the vehicle rather than destroy it. There is always a way around armor. Also, tip it in a ditch and hit it from underneath and it ain’t so tough.
Nathan Parrish Nah man, it’s cool. If Matthew Browne get’s a kick out of making the tankiest tank that ever tanked and then driving it around the galaxy, that sounds like a fun time (especially if everyone else is on-board with being a base-smashing group of mercs/raiders)
Also, no matter how heavily armored your tank is, it can’t protect you from heartbreak. Or taxes.
Hammer’s Slammers, PbtA!
And there’s so many fun ways for a supertank to fail…
“It’s how much to transport my vehicle?”
“Um. Mud. Yeah, you see…”
“Spares are how much?”
“-eed infantry support, now, dammit! Clear those fuckers out of those buildings, or those AT rockets are going to roast us alive!”
(I could put together a lot of sneaky infantry with good ATGMs, or just AT-RPGs, for the same cost as one supertank. At least, I could in ‘reality’, I’ll have to cost it out in UW.)
(Studying what is publicly available about M1 Abrams losses in Iraq is instructive as to the vulnerability of the modern equivalent of the Tankiest Tank that ever Tanked. Driving off bridges in a dust storm. ‘Lucky’ hits from advanced RPG/ATGMs. Running over really, really big IEDs. Busted tracks. Broken engines. Sure, it’ll be tough against weapons fire, but there’s always something.)
I’d need an upgrade invested in something like “Anti-Orbital” before I’d let a ground vehicle be properly anti-starship. I mean, sure, if the starship is within the expected range for a Super Tank, great — blammo, it’ll hurt.
But I’d fully expect a party who knew what they were up against to just stay in the upper atmosphere, spin over, and go full orbital laser strike on a super tank.
I’m with Alfred Rudzki here. I’d rule something like “well your tank is immune to the orbital laser fire, but the interior of your tank is now 900 degrees”
“Also, no matter how heavily armored your tank is, it can’t protect you from heartbreak. Or taxes.”
The Honbrete Collective has ruled on your lien hearing, in your absence, and awarded damages in kind to your creditors. Since your only asset of worth is the fortified mobile artillery platform “Rommel, You Magnificent Bastard”, we’ve transferred title to the Collective. Agents of the Collective will be visiting your plasma-blasted hellworld shortly to retrieve their new door-buster. Message ends.
Sigh. It’s for people like you that they invented depleted uranium shells (density 19.1 compared to lead’s density of 11.3), and they aren’t so particular that it be fully depleted of radiation, either!
A vehicle heavy on armor could have lots of debilities, it may be heavy and slower than normal, and less maneuverable, and there’s no window big enough to hang your fuzzy dice. I’m sorry, but for me that’s a deal-breaker!
In all seriousness, if a character went on a rampage with a super tank, I’d let them have their fun for a while, then have the Factions deploy gas grenades/biological weapons. That tank is not Sealed.
Interesting bit of trivia: There is currently a patent filing to completely redesign future armored vehicles to be Sealed:
https://www.google.com/patents/US3068757
“In cold weather, the passengers are very uncomfortable and, furthermore, since these vehicles are not airtight, even though air is sucked from outside through a filter, it is impossible to prevent air, loaded with more or less noxious foreign matters (for instance, fighting gases or radioactive dust) from entering into the vehicle through the numerous gaps in the walls of the vehicle.”
So I’d like to clarify something. I’m not trying to break the game with this idea, it’s just something that occurred to me while I was reading the rules. The tank’s not even as unbeatable as I make it sound. For one thing it’s ludicrously expensive and requires two crew members. As Sean said, even if you make it at character creation it would become half your characters focus.
And even if you have it it’s far from indestructible. It’s not sealed or reliable so NBC attacks and mechanical breakdowns are an issue. Plus it’s slow, so avoiding it shouldn’t be difficult. And of course, open field vehicular combat is basically the only thing it can do, it’s hardly going to infiltrate a base or root out someone’s dirty laundry. And the PCs probably already have a class 2 spaceship so it’s not like powerful vehicles are an all new concept.
This was really just an experiment to see what happens if you design a vehicle to be as good a tank as possible, and I’m pretty happy with the results.
Most armored vehicles for the last few decades (Abrams, Bradley, Patton, etc.) have used an overpressure NBC system…which I think that patent, issued in 1962, describes.
Matthew Browne No worries, it’s an awesome idea and thought experiment!
Tanky tanks is why the “break something” GM move was invented.
“Your rampage is going well. The enemy is fleeing. You’re just lining up on the last enemy position when you notice the ‘low battery’ light flickering…”
Larp Wellington “Damn it, I’m sure I had a few spare AAs in one of these pockets.”