The issue
Damage in T5 comes in 27 different types, which can be blocked by 8 different protections. Where an attack has multiple types of damage that are blocked by the same protection, these are combined. Thus each protection is resolved independently.
Specifically:
- Ar: Blast + Blow + Bullet + Burn + Corrode + Frag + Pain + Pen + Slash + Tranq + Wound
- Ca: EMP
- Fl: Flash
- Ra: Rad
- So: Bang + Sound
- Ps: Psi
- In: Cold + Electrical + Heat
- Se: Gas + Infection + Pain + Poison + Stench + Tranq + Vacc
But for Ar, there’s a twist: Pen does double against armour, and Frag does half against armour. This leaves the question of how these are ‘un-added’ after overcoming this protection.
Consider a laser weapon that does Burn-2 and Pen-2 hitting a target with Ar 15 protection. Suppose you roll 7 for each damage type … this would give a total of 7+(7*2)=21 points of ‘hit’ damage. This is enough to get through … but how much? If the armour stops regular damage first and then Pen damage, then the target takes 3 points. Alternatively, if the other way round, the target takes 6 points of damage.
The assumption made here is that Frag damage is the easiest stopped, and Pen is the hardest. Therefore, that is the order they are reduced when ‘un-adding’ them. In the example above, the target would take 3 points.
The aid
So that combat isn’t slowed by complicated math, a downloadable Excel spreadsheet for ‘hit’ damage is provided. Only change the orange boxes.
Put the rolled Pen damage in the PEN box, rolled Frag damage in the FRAG box, and the sum of all other ‘hit’ type rolled damage (Blast + Blow + Bullet + Burn + Corrode + Pain + Slash + Tranq + Wound) in the OTHER box.
In the AR column, put the Ar rating of the target’s protection. Five rows are provided in case the target is wearing multiple armours. If damage overcomes one layer, it is applied to the next. (In my campaign, I had a player who wore a chest plate (Ar=22) over a tailored vacc suit (Ar=8), and an oversized heavy coat (Ar=3) over all that.) Any damage that gets through all layers, is shown at the bottom of the table.
The ‘Severity’ value (shown for each layer) is a house rule. If the protection is breached, this indicates the severity of the repair needed to restore the protection (given adequate time and resources). It will be 1D plus a modifier based on the total damage going through relative to the Ar rating of that layer.
The first iteration of this tool had a few issues:
- Wound damage wasn’t doubled after armour
- Knockdown wasn’t calculated
- Non-Ar damage/effects weren’t calculated.
For Ar damage, further analysis of the damage application order was required. Following the ‘mildest’ to ‘strongest’ pattern, for Ar damage we get …
- Pain + Tranq
- Wound
- Frag
- Burn + Corrode
- Blast + Blow
- Slash
- Bullet
- Pen
For armour worn, rather than enter all the specific values, you can now choose an armour/protection from a dropdown list (which you can add to on the “Armour” tab) and select if it is damaged (some values don’t apply to damaged armour but others still do).
New: There is now a ‘select’ dropdown list to calculate damage multiplier (which varies depending on damage type). Now, you should just enter the unmodified damage values and let this aid do the rest.
Fixes: Version 2 had a minor flaw in that the list of armours should be sorted in alphabetical order or it might not always work. The pre-supplied armours are now sorted.