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?
