Rifts again

[starfury]

Just how powerfully Wanked are Rifts on the Ground, Most impressions I got from from old discussions on Spacebattles was that Wh40K Space Marines and Final Society Draka would both have a bit of diffculty facing of Rifts's tougher NPCs and Creathures.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Question.. is this "Rifts" the RPG? and which faction? there are countless ground forces in RIFTS, some indeed rather powerful, but most of so so quality.

[starfury]

the basic Factions Since the old Spacebattles said even the relative lightweight powers like the Coaliton states seem to have some of the more wanked out powers.

I am not really sure since it was rather hard to find the imformation online, But the old Spacebattles did say both Clan elementals of Battletech and Space marines are similar to the SAMAS armored troops of the coalition states.

[SAMAS]

I would say they're probably around 40K levels, maybe higher, until they get to the huge stuff like Titans and spaceships. Rifts is powerful to start with, but doesn't scale up for shit.

[starfury]

Like the infamous Splugorth I keep Hearing about as being High-end units to hunt Space marines and Being a Close match to Final Society Draka.

[Styphon]

I would say they're probably around 40K levels, maybe higher, until they get to the huge stuff like Titans and spaceships. Rifts is powerful to start with, but doesn't scale up for shit.

A little searching at the Palladium Message Boards has produced the prime example of the scaling problem...

While we're on dissing the Devastator, has anyone ever sat down and looked at how pathetic it's MDC is? I mean sure, we've all noticed that it's main gun is less powerful than most handheld plasma ejectors despite being THE LENGTH OF A FREAKING BUS, but let's look at how much mega-damage it can take.

Add up MDC of every single location, and you get a grand total of 7965 megadamage. That's what it takes to trash _everything_ on a Triax Devastator. This doesn't just include big stuff like the main body, pilots compartment, head, and limbs, it covers the whole thing right down to the searchlights cooling pylons, and escape hatches. So we're being generous here. That 7965 MDC is what you need to thrash every single component of the unit, not just what you need to effectively shut it down by destroying the main body.

Beefy until you realise that the thing weighs 150 tons. That's 150,000 kilograms. That's an average of 0.0531 points of MDC (or 5 points of SDC) per kilogram of mass.

Now to put this in context, let's bring out something pretty badass and indestructible: a cardboard box. Let's assume that a medium-sized cardboard box only requires 2 SDC to render completely unusable. Let's further assume that that, since cardboard boxes are fairly light, you probably need ten of them to have a kilogram of cardboard boxes. Ten cardboard boxes? Not a problem, once you've dealt out about 20 SDC damage, all ten of them are completely buggered.

So there you have it folks, pound for pound, according to Palladium's own rules, CARDBOARD BOXES PROVIDE FOUR TIMES THE PROTECTION OF TRIAX DEVASTATORS.

From here.

[The Dark]

the basic Factions Since the old Spacebattles said even the relative lightweight powers like the Coaliton states seem to have some of the more wanked out powers.

On Rifts Earth, the Coalition's not really a lightweight. The only truly comparable powers (off the top of my head) are the NGR and a couple of the Japanese factions, and maybe the weird cyborg Americans in South America. The Splugorth are superior. Other than that, other groups might have a slight advantage in tech or numbers, but a gross inferiority in the other.

I am not really sure since it was rather hard to find the imformation online, But the old Spacebattles did say both Clan elementals of Battletech and Space marines are similar to the SAMAS armored troops of the coalition states.

Maybe. The SAMAS would have a mobility advantage, but firepower would probably be low by either group's standards. Its weapons are enough to take out modern MBTs, but only just enough.

Of course, as said, Rifts doesn't scale well. Don't bother with the anti-tank cannon - your pistol's probably half as powerful per shot and with ten times as much ammunition .

[SAMAS]

I think the problem with it was the fact that instead of matching things up solely against their comparative bretheren(tanks with tanks, for example), they tried to measure it against the classic Adventurer party. That's the only reason I can think of for having the main gun(s) of 90% of the tanks in Rifts incapable of killing a man in armor, and most the ones that can have to use an Anti-Tank shell.

I can think of only one tank in the game with an anti-tank shell that can actually kill another tank in one shot, and that's only against the one tank that suffers double damage from that type of attack, and it still has to make a maximum roll to do it!