A vehicles armour diagram only shows on it the vehicles internal structure and armour, never the placement of the weapons or other components, these are still damaged via the vehicles hit location table.
The vehicle armour diagram (10k)
A vehicle has an amount of internal structure rows equalling half it's internal structure points (rounding up, with a minimum of 1 row, and a maximum of five rows for ground vehicles). These are placed on the diagram next to the thick black 'Vehicle Destroyed' line.
A vehicles armour rows equals the following:
- (amount of armour in that location) / 4
VTOLs have an added location of the rotor. This is damaged in a slightly differently fashion than usual, which is explained below. For now, a Rotor has an amount of damage points equalling the original VTOLs Rotor armour + internal structure points (for a maximum of five points).
Vehicles generally behave as in the normal rules, with regard to movement and the new combat damage system above.However, the following points apply.
While it is physically possible for a damage template to be placed so that it can attack two sides of a vehicle, damage is never carried over in this fashion, and any damage that cannot attack the location on which the hit was scored, is lost. A vehicle is destroyed when any damage (even a single point) crosses into the thick black 'Vehicle Destroyed' section.
VTOL Rotors are handled slightly differently from normal. Whenever the vehicles rotors are hit, they take one point of damage only (regardless of what the weapon would normally do), unless the weapon is either a Pulse Laser, Autocannon (non cluster rounds), Gauss Rifle with Silver Bullet Ammo, or flight of 3-5 LRMs, in which case roll 1D6. On a 1-4, one point of damage is inflicted, but on a 5-6, two points of damage are done.
Weapons like the SRM or LBX Autocannons with Cluster rounds can be devastating to VTOLs as each round that they fire that hits the VTOL gets it's own hit location, with each getting a chance to hit the VTOLs rotors, and thus the damage that they can theoretically score is equal to the amount of submunitions that are fired and hit the vehicle.
Once the rotors have taken damage to equal the rotor damage point rating, they are considered destroyed and the VTOL immediately crashes.
This is 10k.
The standard BattleTech vehicle hit location table can be just a little bit too devastating for vehicles. As a result, I propose a new hit location table for vehicles which combines the standard and critical hit locations into one table.
| Ground/Naval Vehicles | VTOLs | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Front/Rear | Side | Front/Rear | Side | |
| 2 | Armour (6) | Armour (6) | Rotor Destroyed | Rotor Destroyed |
| 3 | Armour (1) | Armour (1) | Rotor (2) | Rotor (2) |
| 4 | Armour (2) | Armour (2) | Rotor (2) | Rotor (2) |
| 5 | Armour | Armour (2) | Armour | Armour |
| 6 | Armour | Armour | Armour | Armour |
| 7 | Armour | Armour | Armour | Armour |
| 8 | Armour | Armour | Armour | Armour |
| 9 | Armour | Armour (3) | Armour (5) | Armour (5) |
| 10 | Turret | Turret | Rotor | Rotor |
| 11 | Turret (4) | Turret (4) | Rotor (2) | Rotor (2) |
| 12 | Turret (5) | Turret (5) | Rotor (6) | Rotor (6) |
| ||||
