The Wargamers' Special: Battle of Tukayyid 40,000

[Jedi Master Spock]

An interesting note: I've seen both AP 1 and AP 2 values for the lascannon in downloads from Games Workshop's website (namely, AP 1 is listed in the Imperial Armored Company army list); I'm thinking this is a nice point to consider regarding the order of magnitude of "game balance" tweaks within the system over time.

It doesn't make a difference against infantry, of course, but a minor tweak like that increases the odds of destroying a vehicle outright in a single hit by 60-100% (factor of 1.6-2) - from 6-28% to 11-44% (mean increase of 11% "destroy" results), if I'm reading the rules correctly (0 in 6 chance to destroy outright with a glancing AP2 hit, 1 in 6 chance to outright destroy a vehicle with a glancing AP1 hit, 2 in 6 chance for a non-glancing AP2 hit, 3 in 6 for a penetrating AP1 hit?).

An adjustment of a single strength point has a similar effect; S10 AP2 adjusts the impact on vehicles by a factor of 1.2-2. Each adjustment in strength has this sort of factor of adjustment for targets affected, making it exponential; a difference of five strength points would give error bounds on the factor of 2.5 and 32. For a 10 damage BT weapon vs a 5 damage weapon, our error bounds on the factor separating them are 1.73 and 2.33.

And now we see why analysis on BT forums focuses on joules per damage point for one or another kind of weapon, while analysis of WH40K mostly ignores the actual numbers of the game mechanics: The mechanical resolution is simply that much worse, even ignoring the cases where one weapon simply cannot hurt a target that the other can (an infinite comparative effect ratio) and the cases where both weapons have the exact same 100% probability of wounding the target.