As promised…

As promised…

Let’s Break The Vehicle Design Rules!

Part 1.

The purpose of this isn’t to say, ‘the vehicle design rules are broken’, but to use them to build some vehicles that break the rules – one real-world, the other fictional. So, why do this? These vehicles might be somewhat extreme, but not so completely over-the-top as to never be encountered – and Sean Gomes himself mentioned Imperator-class Titans, so…there’s not much that isn’t ‘over the top’, when you’re talking about a walking castle with nuclear missiles and opinions. I want to see where this goes in creating things that can and do exist, in both the real world and a standard scifi setting – I don’t think that the rules need to be changed, but I think that things that ‘break’ them are going to come up, and GMs and players should be prepared to handle them.

There’s going to be a lot of thinking out loud in this, so prepare for walls of test.

Let’s start with the real-world vehicle:

M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank

This has Tracked: A continuous-track laying vehicle, capable of significant off-road movement. Fits a driver plus 4 passengers or crew.

(This also makes me realize that we’re missing Hover as a base design type…)

So, what Upgrades does the M1A2 have? It’s a beast, probably the best tank in the world at the moment. Heavily armored, fast, with a powerful cannon and a bunch of machine guns.

Armor first.

So is it Plated, or Reinforced? Good question. Are we building this within the context of just other late 20/early 21 C vehicles, or do we want to be able to drop it in almost anywhere/when? Let’s go with the latter. Plated gives just a + armor, which would make it Armor 5. Not bad, but I’m not sure that gives it that extra toughness that sheets of depleted uranium and Chobham epoxy armor imply. Reinforced gives the same Armor boost, but also notes that it ignores Armor-Piercing (Penetrating?) and Destructive, and must be Breached. I’m torn about this. Penetrating can mean something that easily cuts through personal armor, but that’s a whole different world of protection than tank armor. Destructive seems to be used mainly for explosives, and while you can use explosives to take out an Abrams, it takes a bit – some have been lost to large IEDs in Iraq. Breaching: ‘damages starships and reinforced structures’. Yikes. This is implications for how we’re going to design the main gun, as well. Part of tank design is that you want your frontal armor to be able to hold against your own main gun, on the assumption that you’ll be facing a roughly equivalent enemy.

But tank cannon aren’t the only big scary weapon on the modern battlefield. Missiles, from the manportable Javelin up to the TOW, Hellfire and Maverick, are serious killers, and no small concern to tanks. Do we count those as Penetrating, or Breaching? They are used to take out buildings, or at least severely damage them. They’ll put a nasty hole in almost anything – even old, the TOW is supposed to be able to defeat any armored vehicle in the world, and Javelins have a top-attack mode, to hit tanks on the less-armored top surface. A Hull-Buster is a Class 2 Destructive Heavy Weapon with Breaching and Seeking (but not Penetrating, which is interesting!)

(Tank armor ratios, front to sides to back, are traditionally 8:2:1, with the top and bottom being about as armored as the sides, at best…)

What else has 5 Armor in the book? Spider Tanks and Assault Walkers, both of which by their design are going to be weaker than a tracked tank – they have arms and legs which have to bend and flex, and a tank is two armored boxes, one atop the other, with a few things sticking out of them.

So, let’s go with Reinforced for right now.

Next up, speed. The Abrams is notoriously fast, using a gas turbine engine instead of the traditional diesel. So much so that it has a speed governor on it to limit it to 45-50 mph. There are tales from the early years of M1s reaching 70+ on German highways… 🙂

Is this fast, for a tank? Yes. Can it do this off-road? Eh…depends, do you want your crew to be functional? Is it faster than other equivalent tanks? Turns out, not so much. Modern turbo diesels are pretty good. It has a good power/weight ratio, which is what gives you good acceleration and mobility but it’s not hugely better than other tanks of the same generation. So, Agile isn’t really justified. The turbine is complex, but the whole thing is designed to be pulled and replaced as a unit. Rugged might be reasonable. It would also represent the environmental defenses, whereas Sealed is more than it has (can’t make it work underwater, or in a vacuum).

M1A1 Abrams, (Class 2 Track, 5 Armor, Reinforced, Rugged)

Next, the fun part – guns!

Turret is easy. Big flat spinny thing, cannon sticking out.

What kind of cannon? The 120mm smoothbore is enormously capable. Saboted DU anti-armor darts, high explosive rounds, canister loads full of thousands of tungsten balls…it does it all.

120mm Cannon (Class ?, Clumsy, Destructive, Penetrating, Breaching?)

Do we want to have a ‘switchable’ upgrade, where it gains one but loses another? Trade Breaching for Spray, perhaps? Does it really count as Clumsy if it’s not hand-held? Would it be better considered as a Starship weapon, a smaller cannon? (As point-defense guns on a ship are considered Heavy Weapons, I think this might be a better path to take, but for now, we’ll leave this as is. It also begs the question, do Ship weapons need Upgrades?)

But the cannon isn’t the only armament on this thing. There’s 3 other machine guns, one co-axial with the main gun, and the others on pintle mounts at the commander’s and loader’s hatches. So, is that Armed times 3? Considering that the commander, loader, and gunner can all be firing at the same, or different, targets, that’s a lot of lead going downrange. The coax MG can’t really be fired at the same time as the main gun, and nobody really wants to be outside (which you have to be to fire the two top MGs) when the main gun goes off. So, I just count this as Armed, and note that it’s got 3 of them. Even so, we’ve just broken the system, a little bit…

M1A1 Abrams, (Class 4 Track, 5 Armor, Armed (3), Reinforced, Rugged, Turret)

A Class 4 vehicle asset – technically, Class 4 is only ever Cargo. But this shows that it’s pretty easy to make a vehicle that exceeds Class 3 – especially if we change out the main gun for a light ship-class weapon (which has its own issues). But considering that the Abrams is a multi-million dollar armored fighting vehicle that you can only buy if you’re a national military, exceeding Class 3 doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Next up, Fear and Trembling…