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| Artwork by Louis Glanzman |
Time to take a look on how Armor and Shields work on our starships! I will explain a bit about Scale later!
Armor
Vehicles and starships have are made of resistant materials naturally, but the weapons they used also sport very damaging attacks. As such, they also have armor which provides Damage Reduction just like the armor used by characters. However, it’s important to note that there is a difference in Scale (which will be dealt with below). Even though a starship’s light armor will only absorb 1 point of damage from the laser cannon fired at it by another ship, it will absorb much more damage points if the weapon used was of a smaller Scale.
Like normal armor, vehicles and starships can have 3 distinct categories of armor: Light, medium or heavy armor. As usual, light armor absorbs 1 point of damage from attack, but would limit the Maneuverability of the vehicle or starship to 16. The medium category can absorb 2 points of damage but also limit the Maneuverability to 13. Finally, heavy armor gives 3 points of Damage Reduction, but has an upper limit of 10 in Maneuverability. Due to the very nature and sturdiness of vehicles and ships, this damage reduction affects all kinds of damage, unless specified otherwise.
Armor Category
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Damage Reduction (DR)
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Notes
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Light
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1
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Limits Maneuverability to 16.
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Medium
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2
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Limits Maneuverability to 13.
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Heavy
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3
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Limits Maneuverability to 10.
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Crimson Nebula is a light transport and has light armor plates. The crew decides against implementing more armor in it, preferring to invest in making it as agile and able to escape combatants than to fight them.
Shield
Some very advanced and battle focused vehicles and starships have energy Shields in addition to armor. These shields help absorbing damage suffered from any king, even those that are electromagnetic based, which normally ignore the ship’s armor. Essentially , they provide additional Damage Reduction. However, unlike normal armor, these shields lose potency as more and more attacks hit it. Every attack in a round reduces the amount of the Shield’s Damage Reduction by one after its damage is resolved. So a starship with 4 points of Shield would reduce the first attack it suffers in the round by 4 points of damage. But it would only reduces the second attack by 3 points only. Every round of combat, the Shield regenerates 1 point of its Damage Reduction, as long as it doesn’t reach 0 with multiple attacks. When this happens, the crew must reset the shield with an Intellect test with Difficulty equal to the total amount of Damage Reduction the Shield originally provided, and the Shield only comes back with the value of 1.
Kaylia was manning the Crimson Nebula’s Laser Cannons in a heated battle against a Void Juggernaut. Several rebel ships have already been taken down, but the crew pushed on in a desperate effort to destroy the ship main generators and stop the bombardment of their allies homeworld. The Juggernaut had a Shield 5 score, but since it was hit by 4 starfighters already that round, it only had Shield 1 against Crimson’s attack. If Kaylie hits the enemy ship, its Shield would go down and all their allies would have a better chance on the next round of combat.
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