"Protection adjustments in SabreSquadron" Topic

Hi all, I'm surprised I haven't seen much about SabreSquadron here since the free introductory rules became available months ago. I only heard about it this week and am playing my first game now.

I could've just emailed the authors with this question, but I thought it might be more interesting to ask the community at large, to see what insights I might get. I'm new to company-level gaming with lots of armor. I was wondering why these rules change the "protection" factor of the armor whenever a vehicle receives a hit. It's rule 6.4.3 for those of you with the rules.

Each type of vehicle has protection values against kinetic and chemical weapons, and when one receives a hit, you roll to "adjust the protection" and then compare the new protection value to the weapon's firepower to resolve the hit. Is this just a modified version of an armor save roll? If so, the wording seems strange…but then, so does "armor save," I suppose.

Naturally I'd love to hear from user SabreSquadron as well as anyone else.

Might be to account for randomness in where exactly the vehicle got hit.

Also reflective armor is pretty much a one shot thing where it gets hit. Shot traps and just plain luck factor in also. I have played a few games of Sabre and it makes for some interesting results of sub standard tanks lasting longer and killing better Tanks.

Happy to clarify, boy wundyr x has it right. It allows for the angle and exact place of impact as armour can vary over a face. In cases where the firer's Firepower varies greatly from the target's Protection the roll is unnecessary, but it is crucial at the margins, i.e. when the difference is slight.

In the full rules Reactive and Slat armours have additional effects.

I'm really looking forward to the full rules BTW, I still need a go-to set of modern rules for this size of game.

Thanks all, esp SS. Enjoying these rules so far, and I think they'll compete well with Team Yankee due to the amount of thought and work you've put into them. The layout and organization has worked well for me, easy to read and easy to find things I forgot.