The cortosis shield costs 900 credits.

The cortosis weave attachment (which give the cortosis quality) cost 10,000 credits (it also has a higher rarity).

A PC wants to buy a cortosis shield and dismantle it in order to craft a custom shield with the cortosis quality and more hardpoints (thus bypassing shelling out 10,000 credits to buy the weave). Any suggestions on why this would not be possible? Also, why is there such a price difference?

I think the idea was that cortosis is crazy hard to work with? And once it's shaped it's shaped? I feel like the lore changed on it a few times.

The cortosis shield is listed under weapons in the core book (probably because it's held, not worn (but you can actually attack with it)).

So... would you use weapon crafting or armor crafting rules to craft a shield like this?

Without looking at the rules, I would use armor?

The difference in price may also reflect how hard it is to force someone to drop a shield vs. nullify someone's armor.

Keeping The Peace has attachments that are specific to shields listed under Weapon Attachments. I would read that to mean that RAW they can only use Weapon Attachments and not Armour Attachments. Obviously GM that anyway you like.

13 minutes ago, Squirrelsan said:

Keeping The Peace has attachments that are specific to shields listed under Weapon Attachments. I would read that to mean that RAW they can only use Weapon Attachments and not Armour Attachments. Obviously GM that anyway you like.

Could you use refined cortosis on a shield? That's the reason I leaned toward armor, a refined cortosis shield seemed too... odd. If you can... I may need a shield.

1 hour ago, Dunefarble said:

Without looking at the rules, I would use armor?

The difference in price may also reflect how hard it is to force someone to drop a shield vs. nullify someone's armor.

In my opinion, price shouldn't reflect game balance so much as how much is actually costs to make and manufacture an item. It's more than a bit jarring to see an entire shield made/woven with a supposedly rare and expensive material cost less than a heavy blaster rifle.

SM has a shield template. Besides, removing the cortosis from a cheap cortosis shield would be the easy task, creating the cortosis weave which can applied as a removable attachment to another armor … now that is the tricky part and can currently not done by the rules. Guess the poor players have to buy from the cortosis weave cartel which keeps his technique a secret to maximize profit. Don't forget, cortosis is rare, but it still was used as starship armor, it is not that rare that price and rarity of cortosis weave is the major cost factor on the cortosis weave attachment. The items which are build directly with cortosis instead of using the complex cortosis weave support this as the cortosis shield and the cortosis gauntlet are reasonable affordable and both seem to use a lot more rare material than some thin cortosis weave attachment.

Personally, I feel like making anything labelled a 'weave' that is designed to be work over a large part of the body from anything hard sounds fairly difficult. Granted, I am not an armorer in any respect but making something tough, flexible and wearable sounds like a lot more involved a task than creating a shaped slab of the same thing that I can hold.

The section on the Cortosis quality explains a pretty distinct difference between Cortosis weapons & armor, that seems to indicate a different process of handling in how they achieve the different results. I wouldn't allow one thing to be converted into another for cheap.

You can dismantle something with a Quality and get the Quality when making something from the parts? Hmmm... I'm not liking that at all.

43 minutes ago, Oden Gebhac said:

You can dismantle something with a Quality and get the Quality when making something from the parts? Hmmm... I'm not liking that at all.

No you can't

16 minutes ago, SEApocalypse said:

No you can't

I mean, that's the answer he's looking for, correct?

Why is the cortosis in the shield automatically equivalent to the cortosis used in the armour upgrade?

Ok, I figured it out.

1) Shield crafting is in "Special Modifications" under weapons and can get deflection (and some other things thru advantages, but not cortosis).

2) If someone were to dismantle a cortosis shield to get the cortosis, there are no rules for crafting an attachment in order to add it to a shield.

3) Cortosis quality on a shield makes the shield immune to sunder (not the PC) and that's it.

So it's impossible to do by using any given template/rules in the books unless a GM comes up with something on the fly.

By RAW cortosis weave is just for armors, not weapons like a shield. That said, you could allow them to incorporate the cortosis from the shield to the crafted one with the double triumph result in the crafting table. This would reflect the difficulty of shaping cortosis and would prevent from the shield being too crazy in stats, so it remains balanced.

If you let your player make a custom cortosis shield, and that should be a bit IF. You're likely best off to just to a custom template. I would suggest you exercise extreme cause basing anything off the SM shield template however as it has my vote for top 5 worst balanced things in the system. That being said, there is no reason you couldn't come up with something for him and allow part of the template credit cost to come from deconstructing a shield.