Is plate armor better at anything vs. flak jacket/pants?

[jpinard]

I'm a little confused by the numbers.  So I was wondering if full plate armor, like steel or plasteel was better than flak stuff for melee or for taking bullets.

Thanks!

[vzoxz0]

Make both, look at the numbers?

[jpinard]

Make both, look at the numbers?

The thing is there's flak jacket and flak vest, flak pants.  I don't know how numbers work when you combine that with say, plate armor plus devilstrand pants/shirt plus steel plate armor.

[5thHorseman]

[ It'd be nice if the game showed / Does the game show ] values for a pawn. If it did, you (and I because I have the same problem) could just suit up different pawns and then look at the stats.

If you (or I) were bored enough you could set up a shooting gallery and see how different armors faired against against different weapons.

[zizard]

The game's combined values are misleading though.

[5thHorseman]

The game's combined values are misleading though.

So they exist. In what way are they misleading? If they show that one armor blocks 50% of incoming hits and the other 90%, is the 50% one still better or something?

[Thane]

So as far as I can tell when  I played around with them, Plate armor will give you more straight deflections, but you run the risk of more serious failures as well. When you layer up several armors you are more likely to get a partial penetration ie a small wound, rather than nothing or something critical.

Plate armors are also strictly better for melee fights compared to flak due to the presence of clubs and maces.

[bbqftw]

The game's combined values are misleading though.

So they exist. In what way are they misleading? If they show that one armor blocks 50% of incoming hits and the other 90%, is the 50% one still better or something?

armor penetration seems to apply fully against each layer, so summing the values of multiple layers is incredibly misleading.

120% sharps protection from single item is great.

3x40% sharps protection from triple layer is trash.

Which is why flak pants and jacket are also trash.

[Shurp]

I did some math, and stacked protection isn't as awful as you imagine.  Of course it depends on what you compare it to.  Consider an assault rifle bullet (Dam 11, Pen 16). 

Against steel plate armor (sharp 66%) there's a 25% chance of no damage, and 25% chance of half damage, for a total average damage of 6.875.

Against a devilstrand duster (sharp 42%) and flack pants (sharp 40%) you first have 13%/13%, and then 12%/12%, which averages out to 7.26 per bullet.

The square root of the inverse is probably a good rule of thumb to estimate stacked armor effectiveness.  At 0 penetration, 40% armor will remove 30% of damage, leaving 70%, squared is 49% damage, equivalent to a single 51% reduction or 68% armor.  But penetration will bring this down much faster for layers.

[bbqftw]

Your calcs might explain why no decent player uses any of those three. You've spent 1k of your wealth budget for not even close to 50% DR on vitals.

For each 25% of effective armor, EHP increase over unarmored is 23%/37%/68%/172% respectively. Such supralinear scaling makes low armor value items disproportionately bad.

Basically everything but flak vest and deadguy hw/tf duster or marine armor is just marginally better than not wearing anything

[Shurp]

I was trying to calculate the armor value on legs, not vitals.  For a chest, yes, flak vest for the win, no question about it.  Nothing else even comes close.

Am I right in thinking there is no way to mod the 100% / 50% / 0% behavior of armor in B19? Because it doesn't fit the storyline of high strength superfabrics.  A bullet isn't going to ricochet off a hyperweave pair of pants.  I'd like to see a more gradual effect where really good armor tends to entirely block damage while lesser armors just absorb damage...

...hmmm.  Kind of like the original system, where a vest would stop 75% of the damage and superpants would stop 30%.

[Razzoriel]

Plate armor is one single layer of large damage resistance. Flak equipment is two layers of medium damage resistance. However, Flak Jackets can be used in conjunction with Flak Vests, which have better damage resistance than Plate Armor for the chest area (where most of your valuable organs are). The way DR is coded, larger damage penetrates more armor (with the exception of shotguns which have awful penetration). It doesn't matter if it is the claw of a panther, a sword, a bullet.... all follow the 150% damage-to-penetration rule (10 damage has 15% penetration, 20 damage has 30%). This means medium damage resistance items are largely useless because one more small chance to deflect/resist doesn't compensate the better chance to deflect/resist.

The only instance where it can theorically be better is when you're equipping shooters, which could use mobility. So most players are comfortable equipping good-tier dusters (leg protection the flak jacket doesn't have) and flak equipment, and giving plate/marine armor to melee.