Re: 3eSJ: weapons and hull points

I don't have my dmg in front of me, does it make any mention of any type of
weapon that ignores the hardness of the material it is attacking?  I would
think that the catapult or other siege weapons inflicts damage in such a
wide area that it would bypass that and just inflict hull damage.

>As an example of what I was trying to do, consider a heavy catapult (listed
>as doing 5d6 damage in the DMG).  OK, sounds like a lot, but take a Wasp
>(hull of thick wood, maybe three inches thick at 10 hp/inch, hardness of
>5).  The max damage of the catapult is 30, subtract 5 for the hardness,
>gives 25 left, which is not quite enough to punch through the hull.
>*That's a max hit from a heavy catapult*.  And that's only at one point on
>the ship.
>(also consider, average damage of that heavy catapult is 18, which is only
>just enough to bust down a 1 inch thick door)
>
>So from there I tried to think, well, say the heavy catapult does a lot
>more damage, maybe 8d10 (gives 8-80 hp, which is something like the 2-8
>hull points of the old 2e model).  This seems OK versus ships, but woe
>betide the poor charcter who gets hit by one of these!  But ships realy
>need a lot more hp to make them seem reasonable - if a Wasp has 200 hit
>points then a 1-ton ship of the same general construction would have only
>20 hit points (similar to a thick door, and a 1-ton ship, although small,
>is much bigger than a door).
>OK, I know this hp figure is just to make a hole in the door, etc, but a
>hole will not down a ship, you need to screw up it's frame pretty badly to
>bring it down.
>
>Anyway, my conclusions were that someting needs to change pretty
>drastically to get it all to fit for 3e.  Here's some ideas:
>1) Ships need to have lots more Hit Points to keep them balanced against
>other objects.  Maybe of the order of 30 or so hit points per ton of ship.
>I'm still favouring higher than this, as the frame of the ship is important
>as well as the hull (as in Leroy's shipbuilding system).
>2) Thus either weapons need to do a lot more damage to keep them downing
>ships in the same number of shots, or you have to accept that the number of
>hits to take down a ship will become significantly greater.  This last
>change would mean that weapons fire becomes less effective overall, which
>would lead to boarding actions becoming the #1 way to take a ship out.
>ALternatively, it would mean that ship combat becomes a more drawn-out
>proposal, where it is much harder to take a ship down, and combat is more
>likely to be a survivable (albeit damaging) prospect for both sides (not
>necc a bad thing).
>3) Perhaps the 2e Hull Point idea should be kept as is, with weapons rated
>with two different types of damage (vs ships and personnel), and just use
>the hardness and hit points things for characters trying to damage ships
>with spells/hack their way through the hull, etc.
>
>Thoughts and ideas are still floating around in the grey matter, and may
>congeal into something useful at a later date, but I think that's enough
>for now.  In the meantime any comments are welcome.
>
>Cheers
>
>Andrew Tiffany
>
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