tneva82 wrote:
MadCowCrazy wrote:40K armour on the other hand is many hundreds of times better than the best ones we have. The armour in
40k is so good in fact that many are crafted like works of art and almost all power armour is painted in bright colours so you can see the wearer from afar.
No personal armour we have could take a bolt round but
40k armour can to some degrees. In fact the same metric can be used for
40k armour as with our own.
That arqument makes zero sense. That assumes armour is invulnerable. That is NOTHING in
40k can penetrate it. THEN it doesn't matter because you are just as protected with or without.
BUT obviously that's not correct. Space marines die. Armour gets penetrated. Therefore you still need to make armour as protective as possible. This means deflecting impact OUT of your critical area.
Ergo boop plates are still bad idea. Just because you need bigger gun doesn't mean you can wave that away. It works fine as long as you don't face bigger gun but what happens when you do? Answer: Your chances of getting killed increases. You have just made armour that's less efficient than it could be.
Power armour without boop plate=more protective than one without. Simple as that. Only reasons when you don't have to worry about is when your armour is 100% impenetrable or when you don't care whether your armour is good or not.
No, his argument actually makes quite a lot of sense and you just don't seem to grasp it or how weapons interact with armor.
MadCow's point is that armor in
40k is designed to invalidate everything up to a certain abstract "ballistic" strength of weapons which it will encounter. Why did I put "ballistic" in scare quotes? Because by the 41st Millennium we know that a vast majority of fielded weapons are non-kinetic where ballistics largely stops being relevant and instead you now have to worry about entirely different principles such as heat dispersion.
Weapons like lasguns, vortex grenades, vibrocannons, zzap guns, grav guns, plasma cannons, tesla guns, etc. don't care at all what shape your armor is so much as what it is made of. You either have a material that is proof against the type of energy being thrown at it, or you watch you armor either suffer a material failure or turn into a deathtrap.
Even looking at specifically ballistic weapons against armor it still doesn't matter. Shaped hard armor has only ever applied to body armor utilized in deflecting close combat weapons relying on piecing or cleaving or low force bearing projectiles. That's it.
If a ballistic weapon has enough directed force to penetrate power armor then it will penetrate it regardless of where on the armor it hits. If a specific ammunition type can't penetrate the armor outright then you are left with only two options:
1) put enough rounds into the armor to induce a structural flaw which will allow for material failure (this is entirely dependent on the material and the armor's design)
2) aim for a spot not protected by said material (aka a video game-esq weakpoint) [#2 by the way is the reason why Space Marine MKVIII Errant Armor exists, because the most effective way to kill a Space Marine in lore is to target the soft-armor at the joints and neck.]
Thus the real failure of Sororitas boob armor is the minimal (assuming they wear their freakin helmet) chance that a projectile without the force capable to penetrate their armor will ricochet of their off the top, outer sides, or bottom of their breast-bastions into either the soft armor under their helmet (or just your face if you decided to feel the gore in your hair today), the elbow joints, or the top of the thigh.
The chance of any of which involving a ridiculous amount of luck or probably pool-god levels of mental geometry. (or if your a psyker and cheat. The real reason why
SoB hunt witches)
For anything with the actual force to penetrate
SoB power armor it really doesn't matter if it glances off the boob into the center or hits directly between them from start, as the effect will be the same. Which is to say that there is a very good chance of that bullet punching through her armor.
"So why do people always say that boob armor is dangerous and ineffective?"
Because the context that tied to that statement has been lost over the course of it being used as an argumentum ad infinitum.
That statement about boob armor being dangerous specifically argued against in the context of fantasy settings where parallels can easily be drawn to historical medieval weapons. In that case, yes, boob armor is bad because a spear or sword being directed towards center mass allows the wielder to direct all the force from the strike into their target. What also matters here is that even during the heyday of medieval armor there were still plenty of ways that you could beat it. What was significant was that armor increased your chances of survival by saving your from attacks which would normally kill a lesser armored soldier, and when you are a noble who doesn't want to die in a field of piss and gak you are willing take every possible advantage you can. So yeah, fantasy boob armor is absolutely impractical.
And even with
40ks obsession of having melee specific troops, boob armor still really isn't that much of a negative when you consider that the large majority of those melee specialists are armed with weapons strong enough to penetrate either vehicles or power armored infantry. Which leads us back to the idea that yeah, its not doing you any favors, but if the enemy is attacking you with can-openers then your armor probably won't stand up to the blow no matter where it gets hit. Best defense? Buy a rosarius.
Edit: I missed some words