Wednesday, May 9, 2012 - Since we are slowly posting up all of the material from the old Beyond the Barbed Wire project, we thought we might also post up some of our notes to give those of you who are intrested, some insight into the basis of our first generation Armor penetration rules.

Penetration capabilities of Rifle Rounds
Almost all armored vehicles were designed with sufficient amour protection as to protect the vehicle and crew from standard rifle ammunition. But early fighting vehicles such as the Panzer I and to a small degree the Panzer II suffered vulnerabilities to specially designed hard-core rifle caliber projectiles – amour piercing bullets.

These bullets could be fired from the standard rifle, but in practice machine gunners staggered amour piercing bullets (along with other bullet types) into their machinegun belts – thus a spray of bullets from a machinegun would contain a range of different projectiles.

Using the recorded penetrating capabilities of standard German rifle ammunition as a guide, the capabilities for standard rifle rounds are as follows:

Using the recorded penetrating capabilities of standard German amour piercing rifle ammunition as a guide, the capabilities for standard rifle rounds are as follows:

Using this data we can create a game mechanic to handle certain types of events.

All standard rifle and machine gun ammunition that is classed are amour piercing has a penetration value of +0.

Shooting Through Cover
In a gunfight cover is only a bonus if a rifle bullet (or whatever your being shot at by) can not penetrate the cover your hiding behind. Items such as large trees and brick walls make perfect bullet proof cover, but wooden fences and car doors are terrible - in fact some rifles can shoot right through an entire car without any problems!

When using a rifle to fire at a concealed character the shooter can attempt a special attack where he aims to fire at the target through the very cover the target is hiding behind. To do so requires great concentration to aim and estimate the position of the targets body behind the cover – thus this attack form may be performed as a full round action by characters who have taken the Weapon Focus Feat with the rifle.

The shooter rolls a standard attack roll against the target. If the attack roll is high enough to hit the character but lower that the characters full cover bonus that shoot as hit the cover and the shooter must now roll a penetration roll to see if the bullet was able to punch through the cover and hit the target character. If the penetration roll is successful, the bullet punched through the cover and into the target. If the roll was not successful, the bullet hit the cover and was unable to penetrate.

If the to hit roll was high enough to exceed the target characters defense bonus plus any cover bonus, the shoot missed the cover and hit the target character directly as per normal.

To find the Beyond the Barbed Wire material, click on the projects button below, then select Beyond the Barbed Wire from the sidebar menu. Or just click here.

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