Battle Armor

I've talked a great deal about the combat mechanics of A Time of War recently, and I look forward to getting back to other topics next week, but there's one last thing that my investigation of the combat rules turned up that's really worth talking about. Battle Armor.

When I first started playing BattleTech, the Clan Invasion arc was just beginning, and the appearance of Elementals on the battlefield was horrifying. Fairly soon we learned how to deal with them, but for a while there, battle-armored Clan troopers were a nightmare. Now, looking at them again from the perspective of a man with a gun, they are once again absolutely terrifying, but for an entirely different reason.

A Time of War makes a distinction between Personal Armor and Tactical Armor, the latter being the kind of armor that is put on vehicles and 'Mechs and the like. Battle Armor occupies one of those strange middlegrounds that anybody who has played in this universe long enough will be all-too-familiar with. For the most part, it is treated as Tactical Armor, except for the fact that it potentially delivers damage to its occupant.

What does that mean? OK, from the top.

Battle armor is full-body encasing armor. The protection it provides is given in the same format as personal armor (M/B/E/X), however, those values work rather differently than they do for personal armor. For the sake of simplicity and familiarity, I'm going to use the Clan Elemental suit to illustrate how Battle Armor works. (Amusingly, while researching this post, I discovered the Clan Elemental was never printed in a Technical Readout until Technical Readout 3058: Upgrade was printed; before it had always been in the Record Sheets.)

A Clan Elemental Suit has 10 points of armor (we don't count the trooper inside for these purposes.) To determine the equivalent BAR ratings, we flip to page 187 of A Time of War, and look up Clan Armor with a 10 points. That gives us a rating of 9/8/8/8. That's a horrifying amoount of armor under the Personal Armor rules, but wait! It gets better.

When Battle Armor is hit with an attack, we calculate the damage as befits its type (note that per page 186, it appears Splash damage does not get its +1 AP when attacking Battle Armor without the Hit Location rules in effect). The damage is then reduced by the amount the BAR for the damage type exceeds the Armor Penetration (BAR - AP, if BAR is greater than AP), just as is done with Personal Armor. Then, and this is the terrible part, we divide the damage by the relevant BAR, and round normally. This damage may round down to zero.

Then there's the issue of actually damaging the pilot inside -- that's sometimes easier than trying to destroy the armor in A Time of War. The battle armor deals 1 point of damage to its pilot for each point in excess of 1 that it takes in a single attack; so as long as the armor is getting pelted with 1-damage attacks, the pilot will be fine. If a 5-damage attack hits it (after all BAR reductions), the pilot will take 4 Standard damage, and the pilot is subject to all the consciousness checks and the like you'd normally get from that kind of pain.

So let's talk about that Revolver that's so likely to kill our dear friend Clark, shall we? That same 4B/4 shot at a Clan Elemental will hit its 8 Ballistic BAR and get reduced to zero outright by the BAR - AP being equal to its base damage. Even if it break through that by picking up damage on the Margin of Success roll, it would need to get 4 bonus points of damage (+16 for those of you keeping track at home) to score 1 point of damage on that armor.

OK, so beat officers can't deal with Battle Armored Clanners. We've known that for going on 30 years in-universe. What does it take to stop an Elemental?

Well, to be a Clan Elemental, you have a BOD minimum of 6. That means the frailest elemental needs to have 7 points, or 56 points before applying the BAR, of damage come in one blow before he's even rolling for Bleeding. Consciousness might be easier, but with a WIL minimum of 4, unless he's already badly hurt, you'll likely destroy the suit before you render the pilot unconscious.

To put even a single point of damage on the suit itself, though, you need something that will do at least 4 damage through BAR 8 armor. What in A Time of War meets that spec? In Melee land, some of the nicer Vibroaxes and Vibroswords could get up into that range with a high STR stat and good MoS on the roll, but then you're contending with the 9 Melee BAR instead of the 8 Everything-Else BAR.

The Federated Barrett M42B (page 266) in Standard Mode would "only" need an MoS of 5 to put a point of damage on the suit. Unfortunately, that weapon is difficult to get your hands on even if you are FedSuns. An Avenger CCW (page 268) loaded with solid ammo, effectively a ClanTech shotgun, would do the job. The excessively difficult-to-obtain Gauss Rifles (Small Arms, not 'Mech-scale) on the same page could also put a point of damage on this target with a reasonable MoS. Even a Heavy Gyrojet Gun will likely be unable to hurt this suit.

Once you start getting into crew-manned Support Weapons, you can start fantasizing about putting multiple points of damage on this suit in a single hit, but the point is that these suits are incredibly resilient, and given the enormous amount of effort it would take to drop even one of them, I'm getting very worried about how I'm going to handle Shin getting a suit of Battle Armor at some point later in the campaign; it will undoubtably mean me having to deploy some serious hardware to even threaten him, but anything that can put a dent in his armor will obliterate anybody else in the party.