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[Madman198237]

...

Can we PLEASE get away from that ridiculously false belief?

If it's not hard at all, it's... not hard at all. Basically, if it makes sense that it'd be Easy, then it will be Easy. We could literally take a WORLD WAR TWO FLAK JACKET and just replace the plates with alien alloy (And some adhesive so they don't fall out after a plasma strike, but, *duh*) and it'd be pretty effective, and Trivial as a revision.

We could certainly get away with a Normal revision by just replacing the ceramic plates from a standard heavy-duty modern ballistics vest with alien alloy plates, again possibly with some adhesive or asbestos-based fiber or something so it doesn't burn away when hit. Either way, it's not going to be design levels of difficulty since we already have the prerequisites of:
1. Knowing how to make alien alloy
2. Knowing how to work alien alloy

There's ZERO difference between making infantry armor plates and making aircraft armor, except for how big a piece you're cutting. That's it. It ain't rocket science, people.

[Blood_Librarian]

Yes. Because Aerospace armor, armor that is designed with aerodynamics and completely different environmental conditions and even compositions can totally be just. Cut out, and then shaped into plates, and then just slapped onto a dudes armor.

If we want to replace all the plates we have  on our current armor with new alien-based ones, I would assume that they take completely different methods of manufacture to make the best possible optimized set of armor for our soldiers.

Yes, we could just do the equivalent of taking off all the armor of a tank and welding a different alloy on it, but Why?

It would be on some level a jury rigged solution, a stop gap until we fabricate a special set of powered armor that would deserve the design.

It would be completely within reason to fabricate a set of powered armor using some type of pneumatics, and then cover it in plate armor of Alien Alloys. That sounds worthy of a design, and would be completely within reason for our ability.

[Chiefwaffles]

You should all know by now the level of similarity with the XCOM games.

In order to unlock Carapace Armor in XCOM 1, which looks like this:


You need alien weapon fragments (alien equipment token), then you need to research Alien Materials (which unlocks a crappy +1 HP vest item), then, once you have enough alloys (alloy token), you need to research Carapace Armor.
Titan Armor - power armor- comes in the end-game with Carapace Armor as one of its prerequisites. It’d be out of the question for us to design power armor now since we have exactly zero experience in the actual “power armor” part. The problem  with power armor is not the material used.


If we want to make alloy armor that will actually help our troops, we need an actual armor design. Something equivalent to Carapace Armor. We can’t get that on a revision to heavy aircraft armor plating.

[Madman198237]

...Really?
That's what you're going with?
The shape is different and thus OHMYGOODNESSIT'SADESIGNFORSURE!

I already pointed out that the shape you're making is very similar. Heck, it might even be easier to make the infantry stuff, because there won't be any radar-absorbent coatings or extra-smooth finishes that modern super-fighters might make use of.

But my point remains. Shaping alien alloy for an aircraft and then shaping the EXACT SAME ALLOY (since it's ALIEN ALLOY, not ALIEN ALLOY [AIRCRAFT VERSION]) for infantry is not significantly different. Not in the actual forging process (whatever that may be with magic alien stuff), at least. Not applying any fancy coatings to the infantry armor ought to be easy enough.

Once again: It might even be easier to make infantry stuff, because the quality control can be a whole lot looser without negative impact on performance. It wouldn't be jury-rigged, and it wouldn't be insufficient. It would, however, be unpowered, by with the aliens' absurdly lightweight alloy, we could probably go borrow a whole set from a museum the design philosophy of Gothic plate and make full-body armor that's not actually very heavy (Most medieval armor suits used on the battlefield weighed less than 40, 45 pounds all told, and this weight was distributed across the body making it easy to carry. A man in plate could do everything he could do without the plate, with a couple of not-crippling exceptions).

And that'd be revision-tier stuff too, because it's taking a premade design and just changing the material used.

And in reply to Chiefwaffles:
Why in the heck do you two think we're changing the material AT ALL? Last I checked, the only difference between the alloy used on the aircraft and the alloy used everywhere else is the AMOUNT, not the actual material itself.

[Chiefwaffles]

You seem to be somehow missing literally my entire point.

We have not ever made infantry armor before.
In the game this FG is very heavily based on, infantry armor is its own, hard, research thing exactly on par with handheld laser rifles.

We can not make competent infantry armor by revising superheavy hybrid interceptor armor. It doesn’t matter what experience we have with alloys. If we want good infantry armor, we have to design it.

[Blood_Librarian]

Yes @Chiefwaffles. because game-balance in a video game totally equates to balance in an Arms race Game.

If we are going to fabricate armor, I would be sorely disappointed if all you made it out to me is just "make armor plates in the form of armor for our marines. We can do so much more, if not in terms of protection, at the  very least in miscilanious utility. Automated Bio-monitors that would administer treatment int he form of painkillers, anesthetic and adrenal solutions when needed, a more augmented HUD system, stealth-friendly boots with sound absorbing systems, etc, etc.

To just make armor would be a waste of a design in any form, unless it has more features then "protects man from gunshots".

But if we make a system that happens to be an armor would be a proper use of both the alloy and electronic systems that we discover in our quest to pilfer alien technology.

@Madman, I'd rather invest a design and make a bad ass set of armor then make some nerd-ass inserts that replace our current armor.

Yes, the shape is different. But an aircraft is not just a shell of metal, its an aerodynamic shape of metal with special design considerations around its purpose. With a person-armor, just committing a revision to making an armor will get us just that; A set of armor that might protect our soldiers by the inclusion of alien alloys. If we invest fully in a design by integrating some electronic systems as well as alien alloys in its construction, we get the benefits of fully integrating high craftsmanship quality into the armor as well as whole new features that we dont have right now. Anything from medical systems to aim assistance and augmented HUD systems are all within the realm of possibility of designing  a new set of armor rather then replacing all the inserts with alloy.

[Chiefwaffles]

Don’t get me wrong. An armor design would be more than just “alloy armor” (though that’d still be well worth a design). But that’d be its main feature and it’d be nowhere near power armor.

And yes. Game balance in XCOM does have relevance where because this entire AR is built around the XCOM game and its balancing. Even the tokens near-perfectly mimic the various requirements on the XCOM1 tech tree.

[Madman198237]

My point, Blood, happens to be that we don't NEED all the fancy extras. We just need to make a single unit of TAV+alien-alloy armor to VASTLY increase survivability.

And yes, the aircraft IS just a shell of metal in an aerodynamic shape. That is the essence of it. It's got perforations and weird geometry in places and it's probably quality-controlled to within an inch of its life to allow it to slice through the air with a minimum amount of drag, but it's still the SAME METAL, which is my entire point. It's the same metal, therefore it's not going to be hard to make it in appropriate infantry shapes.

Chief, I reiterate: We have the knowledge base of "how to make metal-based armor that is very protective". We have the knowledge of "how to work alien alloy". The alloy used in our planes is the EXACT SAME ALLOY that will be used in the infantry armor, it's just not as thick in the infantry armor. I don't know about you, but I am 100% certain that it's going to be pretty simple to take the infantry armor we have in our pregame tech base and/or look up some plate armor designs from the Internet and just make those, but with alien alloy. Boom, instant protection. Substitute a TAV setup for a helmet and we've got ourselves knights in shining armor but with computers.


In short: I don't know why you think that the aircraft uses a different metal than infantry armor would.

The game that this is based on has ALMOST NOTHING to do with difficulty, because that game is balanced to make the campaign longer/harder/whatever, while this one is not balanced like that. This one is balanced more around realism (I hope), although perhaps we should just

Hey, ebbor: Is this game balanced around XCOM of some sort or is it balanced more around realism, with respect to design difficulty?

[Chiefwaffles]

Our major actions have been perfectly in sync with game balance.

We rushed lasers railguns using weapon fragments the alien equipment token and got increased difficulty. Because in the game, there’s a tech that you research with weapon fragments an alien equipment token needed first for lasers railguns. We just went directly to railguns using weapon fragments our alien equipment token.

Or how we designed our fighter with a good difficulty once we got the tokens and prerequisite experience nearly identical to that’s of the game. The XCOM1 Firestorm requires research of elerium, a salvaged alien power core power core token, and alien navigation an alien navigation token. We just already messed with alien navigation and Ebbor felt that a gravity propulsion token was missing from the game (which I agree with.)


If you look at our actual designs and their difficulty of everything we’ve done so far, the extreme similarities to XCOM1 balancing are obvious.

[Madman198237]

Then I ask you: Have they been perfectly in-sync because Ebbor wants them to be; because those difficulties and technical challenges make sense; or because we've so far ended up doing things similar to actual things you do in XCOM?

[Blood_Librarian]

@Chief Waffles

I absolutely refuse to believe that our resident GM will follow that IP up too and including the difficulty of armor versus everything else.

Most of the difficulty related to the production of the theoretical armor would probably be in the shaping the alloys themselves, which we have done so extensively with our aircraft manipulation. This means that its gonna be easier to make our alloy armor, possibly to the point where we could make it in a revision. I am against Alloy armor as a revision, but I am also against Alloy Armor and a little bit of something else as a design, because I believe that would be so easy that it wouldn't be worth the tokens and our time.

What I would be for is a armor design where the armor is made as well as features that would increase our soldiers survivability even further, maybe some sort of modular system with wrist mounted weapon modules and different types of gear for soldiers to pick (Ultra heavy plates for heavy weapon soldiers, ultra light for scouts, etc.)

@Madman

I want all the fancy extras, because that means our soldiers would be better in ways beyond something that could be countered with, say, a cartridge of plasma that pierces the armor and then releases the plasma, resulting in a boiling soldier. Its litterally just a direct counter to enemy weapons when we could have it do something beyond protecting our soldiers. With our soldiers, we can use a more protective but heavier armor plate because it doesnt need to be ultra light for our aircraft as it does our soldiers, but it would still be revision material


My proposal would be something along hte lines of a moduular armor system where plates of varying thickness could be chosen by our soldiers, and modules of varying types (Medical, scanning, Aim-help, Hud modules, carrying capacity, etc.) could be attached to various points of the armor, allowing for a system where improvements could be added and we have a baseline armor system that could be tactically adjusted before the battle based upon our needs..

If a soldier is going to an urban combat situation, they might opt for heavier armor and certain scanners to be better able to withhold ambushes, while a long desert situation might take aim-help for long range engagements, and so on and so on.

[Chiefwaffles]

Even if you somehow don’t see/believe the super-obvious balance connection, you can look st it from the perspective of AR balance.

Proper alloy armor would be extremely useful. Extremely.
This, if won’t be practical as just a revision.

[Madman198237]

...
So it won't be easy because it'd be useful, even if it is extremely easy to physically do.


I'm 100% certain that that's not the case, but I can't disprove it any more than you can prove it, so we ought to just wait for the GM to weigh in.

[10ebbor10]

Then I ask you: Have they been perfectly in-sync because Ebbor wants them to be; because those difficulties and technical challenges make sense; or because we've so far ended up doing things similar to actual things you do in XCOM?

I work in mysterious ways.

That said, my primary intention is to balance things realistically based on an XCOM like setting. So whatever physics XCOM operates under, that is the way the world works here. But the XCOM conventions aren't strictly followed, after all, you deploy more than 6 people to a single battlefield.

The only exception are overrides against things that would break the game. For example, the Aliens trying orbital bombardement.

[Blood_Librarian]

you sending me mixed signals here!

realistically

Balance

Xcom-LIke Setting

you agreed with all of us and none of us!