Importing P.V. weaponery and armors to A.R. Robotech?

[xunk16]

So, long story short, we've just had our Gm and a player falling randomly on a copy of "The Compendium of Contemporary Weapons".
Since we're still in 1998, and with the GCW in full gears, they thought this would be a great addition. And for some of the stuff in there, it is.
I'd wager it'll also come in handy when we finally arrive at Master Saga and New Generation.
The weapons list for damages, bullets numbers, shooting style and range might get used a lot. I also am pretty happy that my own tank variants stays in balance, more or less, with those published in that book.

However, Penetration Values and Armor Ratings are more or less mutually exclusive, as it stands out.
I already knew about the issue before our game began, and I had built up some generic armour stats to use in our game.
Mostly variants on the UEDF flight suit toned down -25% for infantry and tank crews armour, and -50% for actual flight suits pre-dating the reverse engineering of alien materials.
This gave us a generic A.R. value of 10 to 13 for that era, with kevlar reduced to 7 against bladed weapons.
We also had the joys of converting each weapons the players had manually, from Wikipedia, and using the parameters from Shadow Chronicles' skills.
But this didn't prevent the impulse buy, prior to their discovery of the full meaning of that fact.
And to be fair, there is some pretty interesting stuff we might want to use in there. It's just that it seems weird to globally change the way armor works in the middle of a campaign, to abandon it most of the time later.

So...

Is there anyone else out there who has worked out a way to convert all this old P.V. "realistic" stuff to the more "anime style", and second edition accurate, A.R.?

I don't even know if such a thing would be possible for bullet types... And it's only one stat lost upon many other modifiers.
At least these rules gives us information about stoping power. With the odd omission of the rubber bullets for crowd control, which are still only mentioned in passing by RUE at 2 S.D.C. fixed.
But most of that stuff could technically be learned and applied only when relevant.
Meaning only when it actually hits a player, not the armour, or when a called shot is done successfully at S.D.C. scale.
In any case, I figure the General Damage Rating can be used to reverse engineer most of the rules using P.V. for malus inflicted upon the reception of a wound.
Without having to keep track of one more stat, reacting differently to every armour, for every shot fired in a game.

On the other hand though, the armours all mostly refers to generic armour classes.
So if one were to ditch the P.V. in favor of A.R., how would one convert the information of one into the other, and deduct the S.D.C. of the given armor classes from there? If at all possible?
Or did any more recent compendium settle that issue by giving the armour classes proper A.R. and S.D.C. ranges?

[jaymz]

I came up with my own system and tweaked how AR worked in general allowing me to give it to everything if I choose.

PV was problematic all the way back to HU revised when i first saw it.

[Jefffar]

I ran a few games with all of the optional rules from the Compendium of Modern Weapons on. With the Shock rules in place basically 1 hit incapacitates a character even if it doesn't drop them through the shock rules and the fact that body armour no longer 'stops' the wound in most cases.

I actually highly recommend it if you want a very gritty style of campaign.

Now as for your question related to the armours - the 2 systems are radically different enough that I would avoid running them in tandem, either use PV or AR, not both. You can leave the SDC in place (though I'd reduce it quite a bit in the cases of the heavier armours) to represent the deterioration of the ceramic and metal plates used to actually stop the bullets. Every point of damage stopped by the armour comes off its SDC. Make the armour work against the hit unless there's a Called Shot to a weak spot or uncovered area.


Personally I've moved on to a damage soak system for armour. Faster, simpler and realistic enough to feel right.

[xunk16]

I came up with my own system and tweaked how AR worked in general allowing me to give it to everything if I choose.

PV was problematic all the way back to HU revised when i first saw it.

Yup. That's why I took the last minute job of creating some generic armour.

I ran a few games with all of the optional rules from the Compendium of Modern Weapons on. With the Shock rules in place basically 1 hit incapacitates a character even if it doesn't drop them through the shock rules and the fact that body armour no longer 'stops' the wound in most cases.

I actually highly recommend it if you want a very gritty style of campaign.

From the little I've read from it so far, I have no problems believing you on that "gritty style". In any cases, they would really force a group of player to work together in order to survive almost anything. Which can be a good thing. It'll all depend on how our Gm decides to tell his campaign.

Now as for your question related to the armours - the 2 systems are radically different enough that I would avoid running them in tandem, either use PV or AR, not both. You can leave the SDC in place (though I'd reduce it quite a bit in the cases of the heavier armours) to represent the deterioration of the ceramic and metal plates used to actually stop the bullets. Every point of damage stopped by the armour comes off its SDC. Make the armour work against the hit unless there's a Called Shot to a weak spot or uncovered area.

Personally I've moved on to a damage soak system for armour. Faster, simpler and realistic enough to feel right.

Well, at least both answers seems to agree with my own assessment. Thanks to you both!
Weird though, that they never did a rifter errata on modern armour classes in A.R.

[slade the sniper]

Well, if you want to use them together and have it be easy.
AR of the armor minus the PV of the weapon shooting at you = the adjusted AR vs modern armor designed to protect against bullets. AR - (PVx2) = adjusted AR vs archaic armor because that armor sucks at stopping bullets. Any bullet that hits but doesn't penetrate the AR reduces the SDC per normal.

That makes even the AR 17 Class 4 hard armor vest have an AR of 10 vs .50 Caliber rounds.

That makes even small bullets a little bit more penetrative than they are in the base game using only AR. That isn't too far off, since the lowest penetration test I could find using .22 LR out of a revolver with a 1.8 inch barrel at 10 feet pushed a 36 grain bullet at 1036 feet per second 10.3 inches into ballistic gel after passing through 4 layers of denim. Not amazing, but that is a pretty fair bit of penetration for a really small bullet.
https://www.guns.com/news/review/gel-test-22-lr-for-defense-the-little-round-that-could

-STS

[xunk16]

Well, if you want to use them together and have it be easy.
AR of the armor minus the PV of the weapon shooting at you = the adjusted AR vs modern armor designed to protect against bullets. AR - (PVx2) = adjusted AR vs archaic armor because that armor sucks at stopping bullets. Any bullet that hits but doesn't penetrate the AR reduces the SDC per normal.

That makes even the AR 17 Class 4 hard armor vest have an AR of 10 vs .50 Caliber rounds.

That makes even small bullets a little bit more penetrative than they are in the base game using only AR. That isn't too far off, since the lowest penetration test I could find using .22 LR out of a revolver with a 1.8 inch barrel at 10 feet pushed a 36 grain bullet at 1036 feet per second 10.3 inches into ballistic gel after passing through 4 layers of denim. Not amazing, but that is a pretty fair bit of penetration for a really small bullet.
https://www.guns.com/news/review/gel-test-22-lr-for-defense-the-little-round-that-could

-STS

Awesome! Thanks! This could be of great help if our Gm chooses to use the stats as is, or if the spy of our group start to use specific ammo.
However... this assume we do have A.R. values for modern armour classes from I to V. Which our copy of the compendium does not give.
Do you have a source for that AR of 17 on Class IVB/C ??? Or is it simply deduced for your own table?