Why is Psi-Wars Armor So Heavy?

 

Mavrick pointed out on the Discord that Psi-Wars armor seems a bit heavy for its description, and asked why this was.

Generally speaking, Psi-Wars matches Ultra-Tech pretty closely, assuming a Battleweave armor is roughly on par with Energy Cloth with 2/3 the DR for the weight. An Energy Cloth suit is 8 lbs, and a Battleweave bodysuit is 8 lbs. There's a bit of a discrepency in that the Energy Cloth suit covers "all" while the Battleweave body suit covers "body and limbs" and so is slightly heavier, but this is because the values in Ultra-Tech are a little generous when you work out their actual values in the armor design system (they're likely Optimized despite their descriptions depicting them as Fabric), which is what I eventually did. So that's the short answer: based on Ultra-Tech, the values are close enough to correct to not worry about the discrepancy.

Sci-fi "Armor"

But in the conversation, he raised a more interesting point: what does this have to do with clothing? I tend to picture battleweave bodysuits as skin-tight garments that super-heroes or super-spies often wear, that's inexplicably tough because it's the future! This hearkens to works like John Wick, where he can wear what looks like a perfectly ordinary suit yet is magically armored "because technology." This allows the character to blend fashion with protection, which is a hallmark for Psi-Wars, especially maradonian characters.

(As an aside, I worry about this sometimes. There are a few elements in Psi-Wars, such as how Extra-Effort works with psi abilities, and the fact that anyone can have DR "for free" but only if you know about it. They represent little complexities that make sense, but are easy for a newbie to miss, and I hate creating "newb traps" in design. But on the other hand, I imagine most people will imagine their sci-fi character, at least those outside of the planetary romance realms of the Umbral Rim and the Sylvan Spiral, as wearing a full covering, and might be pleased to learn that this provides DR).

 

A More Accurate Weighing

Mavrick points to GURPS weights for clothes as better guidelines, but I'd like to go with something a little more specific: Pyramid #3/100 has an article, Fashion Forward, which discusses clothing weight in very specific numbers, and I'll use that. For reference, GURPS clocks "normal clothes" at 2 lbs, but this might be a bit on the low side, but we can spot-check our values against that.

While we're at it, how much should reconsider the weight of Battleweave. It is, after all, our party, and we can set the value at whatever we want. The initial conception of Battleweave treated it as inferior energy cloth, with an armor weight of 0.021 lbs per square foot per DR (vs energy cloth's 0.014). However, in the many years between that initial idea and the present, Battleweave has lots a lot of utility. It now only protects against Burning and Piercing, making it an overwrought version of Bioplas, though I really think it should protect against Cutting too.  If we compare it to Bioplas, it should have a weight modifier of 0.015, while Monocrys might be 0.018. If we peg monocrys as our weight, and just treat it as "Psi-wars Monocrys" what sort of new weights do we get?

Body Suit

"Winter shirt?"

In practice, a bodysuit is actually going to be equivalent to a long-sleeved shirt combined with tights. If we use the Shirt, light and Tights, light, which matches the perspective of a diaphanous bodysuit, Fashion Forward gives us a weight of 0.7 lbs. I suspect Shirt, Regular and Tights, Regular would be closer to the actual thickness we're talking about, and weighs 1.4 lbs. Finally, we might imagine this as a fairly thick garmet: even the sci-fi "armor" above looks like it has more thickness than a T-shirt and pantyhose, so we might go with a Shirt, Winter and Tights, Winter, which clocks us in at 3.5.  So, we might settle on something like 2 to 4 lbs for our Battleweave bodysuit.

Given coverage on all limbs, torso and neck (it's a Psi-Wars thing) we get 17.85 square feet. Assuming the new 0.018 weight, DR 5 would give us 1.6 lbs (the thickness of a normal, long-sleeved shirt and tights) and DR 10 would give us 3.2 lbs, or a bit less than the "winter" weight. If we shrug and push it to DR 15, it clocks in at just under 5 lbs.

What would it take to get it up to DR 20? If the armor weighed 0.0045 (under a third of energy cloth) it would weigh 1.6 lbs, while 0.009 (still less than Energy Cloth) it would weight 3.2 lbs.

I think the weight values in the last paragraph are untenable. It's better armor than anything in the GURPS book that isn't a force field, and we might expect that space-kevlar is more dense than normal armor.  After all, one can wear chainmail so fine it starts to have a thickness similar to clothing, but it will definitely weigh more than clothing.  We might imagine that the battleweave has a similar density. For example, DR 15 might be roughly as thick as a long sleeve cotton shirt and tights, but the additional weight comes from the natural density of an armored material, and 5 lbs does look like a reasonable weight for a compromise between comfort and protection. It is about 1/10th of an inch. thick, by the way.

What about heavier armor such as a jacket or a longcoat?  A long coat clocks in at 5 lbs by itself, and a medium jacket is 1.2 lbs. By my math, I come to DR 20 for 5 lbs on a long coat (assuming the torso, thighs, and the arms are covered) and about 30 for 7.5 lbs. A jacket (arms and torso) is 1.9 lbs for DR 10, and a whopping 3.75 lbs for DR 20.

What about gloves? These tend to break the symmetry of most of the armor systems, and I'm not a fan of that: I'd rather know it's DR X for the whole body than fuss with lots of specific DR values. But even so, Fashion Forward clocks them at 0.5 lbs. Surprisingly, DR 20 comes in at 0.25 lbs! You could go all the way to DR 40 to get gloves as heavy as Fashion Forward's gloves!

Adjusting your Armor?

I honestly like the 0.018 value better than the 0.021 given that the armor is, in fact, less powerful than it is when it was first conceived, but I will note the weight savings you get with this are pretty marginal, especially given the labor that would be involved.

What about lowered DR values? That would justify more of the work, but battleweave already provides so little protection that I'm not sure. It would make battleweave a little more comparable to "space monster leather" as released in the Lithian armor section, and it would be a neat trick to point out that the armor really is literally about as thick/heavy as actual clothes would be.  The DR 15 does still provide some marginal protection: about DR 3 against typical Psi-Wars weapons, which is roughly on par with fantasy cloth, which is its best analogy, and most people use it as an afterthought anyway.

All told, if I look at it, it seems like a neat idea, but more of a nice-to-have than an especially important change.  I suspect it'll bounce around in the back of my head for awhile, because I do find it an interesting idea, so it may get written up at some point, but it won't be soon, I think.