Damage as a Target Number

I've been crunching numbers a lot on the Barrier Armor thing recently, and a pattern emerged for me.  It is generally speaking unrealistic to expect to do more than 1 point of damage to a vehicle in a single blow, so for non-Support vehicles, the question of getting a "hit" can largely be reduced to a question of if the PC can roll a specific TN.

The TN for doing 1 point of damage to a vehicle is (2 *  BAR) - AP - BD for burst weapons.  For non-burst weapons, it becomes (BAR - AP) + 4 * (BAR-BD).  While this formula is mechanically awkward for the PC, it helps with GM-side analysis quite a bit.

Here we have the TNs for different base damages (indicated by the lines) for various armor penetration values against BAR 8 armor with a burst weapon.  Since we're usually used to thinking in terms of TN and difficulty, this help assess how hard it will be for the party to engage a vehicle with a particular weapon.  It gets much, much worse without Burst fire:

TN's don't fall into realistic ranges until AP4 at least, and that's with a very well-trained shooter.  Remembering that even a small vehicle will take at least a dozen hits before it has a reasonable chance of losing any of its capability.

This is all very interesting.  Tomorrow I think I'll look at the same values for explosives.