Everybody has a post

Reference rule — not active yet

The turn, step by step.

Like personal combat, space combat is cyclical. Everybody acts in turn in a regular cycle called a turn, and each turn in space combat lasts one kilosecond. Before the first turn, two things are settled that nothing else in the chapter will settle for you: the range the encounter begins at, and which post every crew member is sitting in.

Step 2 is the one with no dice in it and the one that decides the most. A position is what makes an action available at all — a character not sitting at a turret cannot fire it, and a ship with nobody in the sensors chair takes no sensor actions this turn. You are not choosing a role for flavour; you are choosing which of the nineteen significant actions your ship is able to take.

Step 5’s third clause is the other thing to read carefully. Damage is not applied as each gun fires; it is resolved after every crew member aboard the acting vessel has finished. So a gunner who destroys a turret and a gunner who fires from that same turret both act in the same instant, and the loss does not reach back to cancel the shot.

Reference rule — not active yet

The space range bands.

Range in space combat is a named band, exactly as in personal combat, on a scale of thousands of kilometres instead of metres. If two vessels randomly encounter each other while travelling through the depths of space, far from any other objects or vessels, the encounter will begin at Very Long range. More often, ships engage near a planet, where the range is Short or Medium.

The third column is not decoration and it is not the same kind of fact as the first two. It says what your sensors can tell you about a ship at that distance, and several of its entries are gated on a suite better than standard: internal structure and external structure need Advanced sensors, and anything about neural activity needs Very Advanced. That is the rule that decides whether you know what you are fighting before you commit to it — and it is why a ship that cannot see a target’s configuration may still be able to see that it is there.

Every weapon has exactly one band it is Average at, and everywhere else it is Difficult or worse. The pulse laser wants Short; the beam laser and the fusion gun want Medium; the particle beam and the meson gun want Long. So the range band is not a modifier on your attack — it is the decision about whose guns are in their element, which is why the range check and the pursuit action are contested at all. A ship that dictates the range dictates the fight.

The sandcaster is the exception that proves the shape. It is Routine at Adjacent, Average at Close, Difficult at Short and unavailable past that — a weapon that only works when something is already very close, which is exactly what a defensive system is for.

Reference rule — not active yet

The posts that act in combat.

At the start of an engagement, all crew must be assigned to a position on board ship. There can be only one pilot, but other than that, any number of people can occupy the same position.

Read the two halves of the rule together. Only one person may be the pilot, and everything else may be doubled up — so a crew of four can put two people on damage control and two on the same turret if that is what the fight needs, and a crew of twelve can still only steer once. The pilot is the bottleneck the ship is built around.

Three of the entries are counted rather than chosen. Each turret has its own gunner and each bay weapon has its own gunner, so a ship with four turrets needs four people to fire all four; and a drive engineer can be assigned to each of the M-drive and the J-drive, which is two posts rather than one. Damage control is the opposite — it is described as free-floating and can repair any system, so it is the one position that is not tied to a piece of hardware.

Passenger is a position too, and it is the one nobody chooses. It is defined as everyone aboard who is not assigned a post, and they are assumed to be waiting in staterooms — which matters because they are still aboard when the crew damage table is rolled.

Reference rule — not active yet

Letting the computer take a post.

The ship's computer can cover several positions if it is running the appropriate software. That is what lets a small crew fight a large ship: software sits in a chair nobody is sitting in.

Fire Control is the one with two modes and it is the more useful of them for a crewed ship. It can act as a gunner outright, which is how a turret with nobody in it fires at all — or it can aid an existing gunner, which is how a gunner who is already in the chair shoots better. Every other entry is a straight substitution.

Two of the four need hardware as well as software. Repair drones are physical, and both damage control and the drive engineer require them — so a ship that bought the programs and not the drones has automated neither. The pilot is the one position software can take with no hardware beyond the computer running it, and it is also the position the crew positions rule says only one entity may hold.

Reference rule — not active yet

Who acts first, at ship scale.

Each ship in an engagement rolls 2D6 to determine their starting Initiative score. The ship with a greater Thrust score gains a +1 DM to its roll.

Starting Initiative, per ship

2D6, +1 DM to the ship with the greater Thrust score

The Captain’s contribution

the Effect of a Tactics check, added to the Initiative of the vessel (or fleet)

The Captain of each vessel — or of each fleet, if more than one ship is involved on each side — may make a Tactics check, and its Effect is added to the Initiative of the vessel or fleet. That is the second half of the roll and it is the half a crew controls. The Thrust DM is decided by the ships; the Tactics Effect is decided by whoever is sitting in the captain’s chair.

Notice what the roll does NOT include. Personal combat adds a Dexterity DM to every combatant’s initiative; a ship’s initiative has no characteristic in it at all, because the thing rolling is the vessel. The only place a characteristic reaches this number is through the checklist’s awareness rule, which hands an unaware-opponent’s vessel an automatic 12 plus a Dexterity DM — and that clause is the one exception to a chapter that otherwise never asks the pilot how quick they are.

Reference rule — not active yet

What a space combat turn covers.

Each turn in space combat lasts around one kilosecond (1,000 seconds) of game time. Vessels have individual Initiative and actions are taken in descending order of Initiative — and when a vessel acts, the crew members of the vessel take all of their actions at once. Each crew member gets a minor action and a significant action.

Initiative is not re-rolled but is dynamic, and may be adjusted up and down by actions taken during a turn. So the order you established before the first turn is the order you start from, not the order you are stuck with: the captain’s Increase Initiative action moves it up, and delaying resets it outright. What the chapter does NOT print is any space-scale action that lowers it, so which "actions taken during a turn" adjust it downward is left open.

Other types of action can take place during space combat, and three of them sit outside the minor/significant budget entirely. Free actions are so fast on the scale of space combat that they do not even qualify as a minor action — a character can perform as many of them as he likes in a turn, although if he performs several the Referee may require him to spend a minor or even a significant action on his various tasks.

Extended actions run the other way: some skill checks take longer than a single combat turn to complete. Make a Timing roll for the task and then work out how many combat turns it will take. A character engaging in an extended action cannot do anything else but can abandon their action at any time and return to the normal Initiative order — so the cost is not only the turns, it is that the character is out of the fight for all of them.

That is the rule that makes a jump plot worth shooting at. The DM is the damage itself, so a hit that gets through armour at all is a real threat to the work, and a solid one is very likely to ruin it outright — and ruining it means starting again from nothing, not losing a turn.

Delay is the third. A vessel does not have to act when its turn comes up in the Initiative order: the Captain may decide to act at any later point during the turn, even interrupting another’s actions to do so, and when he acts his Initiative is set to the count on which he acted. If the character has not acted by the end of the turn he may choose to act first in the next turn instead — his new Initiative is set to one higher than that of the current first person in the order — which trades a whole turn’s actions for the top of the order. When multiple characters are delaying and all wish to act first in the following turn, their Initiatives are all set to the same score and they act in order of Thrust as normal.

Reference rule — not active yet

What a crew member does inside a turn.

A space combat turn represents over 150 personal combat rounds, so it stands to reason that crew members may engage in a lot of personal actions over the course of a single combat turn. Much of this is abstracted into the various space combat actions, and most personal actions have minimal impact on space combat.

For crew members that do want to pursue a personal action during space combat — such as use a psionic ability — these actions count as minor actions on the space combat scale. That is the whole conversion, and it is deliberately generous: a kilosecond of a character’s time is glossed over as one minor action, which highlights the primary act the character wanted to pursue without taking away from the rest of the space combat.

One personal action, on the space combat scale

one minor action

Read the ratio and the price together and you can see what the rule is protecting. If a kilosecond were spent as 150 personal rounds, one character walking to a locker would consume more table time than the entire ship battle around them. Pricing it at one minor action says: yes, you did the thing, it did not cost the ship its turn, and we are not playing out the corridor.

Reference rule — not active yet

The small shipboard actions.

As in personal combat, minor actions are actions intended to perform tasks that do not require significant focus and concentration. Each crew member can take up to three minor actions per turn, at the loss of a significant action.

One crew member’s turn

a minor action and a significant action — or up to three minor actions and no significant action

Two of the five need no check at all. Adjusting speed and maintaining course are things the pilot simply does, and the amount of speed available is the ship’s Thrust — so Thrust is both what the initiative DM is decided on and what a turn of acceleration is worth. Nothing is rolled for either, which is why a pilot who is spending her significant action on evasive manoeuvres can still change the ship’s speed in the same turn.

Change Positions is the interesting one, because it means the roster set before the first turn is not permanent. A gunner whose turret has just been destroyed can move to damage control; a passenger can take a post someone has vacated. It costs a minor action, so a character who moves can still take a significant action from their new chair in the same turn.

Note also which of these the printed action summary opens to Anyone. Four of its twenty-eight rows carry Anyone in the crew member column — Change Positions, Personal Action, Reload Weapons System and Miscellaneous — and three of those four are in this section’s list, the exception being Reload Weapons System, which is typed Significant. Miscellaneous is typed Varies rather than Minor there: it is a minor action when the referee judges the skill undemanding, and a significant one when the referee does not. Everything else in the summary is tied to a post.

Reference rule — not active yet

The one real thing a post does.

Significant actions are intended to do something within about 3 seconds. You can perform a single significant action per turn, or forego it to perform a total of three minor actions. This is the one real thing each crew member does, and which of them are available to your ship is decided entirely by who is sitting where.

Attack is the gunner’s. A gunner may attack any target within the range of the weapon system they are manning, by making a Turret Weapons or Bay Weapons skill check roll at a Difficulty determined by range, adding any Computer Targeting, Sensor Targeting, or other modifiers in effect this round for his vessel. The enemy ship may react by dodging, point defense or triggering screens. A gunner may fire any or all of the weapons in his turret or bay, but each turret or bay may only fire once per round.

Damage is resolved after all attacks have been made in a vessel’s turn — and missiles do not impact in the same round they are launched; their damage is resolved in the combat turn that they impact their target. Those two sentences are why the missiles section exists as its own procedure: every other weapon in the game resolves inside the turn that fired it.

Avoid Collision is the pilot’s, and it is not optional. When a vessel is moving at Short or Close range through a debris field, traffic, an asteroid belt, a planetary ring, or similar situation where there is a reasonable chance of collision with another object, the pilot MUST make an Avoid Collision check each turn. A collision inflicts 1D6 damage for every point of the vessel’s current speed.

Collision damage

1D6 for every point of the vessel’s current speed

The last row of that table is not a difficulty, it is a modifier that stacks on one — a significant speed difference between ship and debris is a further DM -2 on whichever situation you are in. So running fast through a heavy asteroid field is Formidable and worse, which is the arithmetic behind every story about a pilot who would not slow down.

Boarding Action belongs to the Chief Security Officer and to marines. If two ships are Adjacent or docked, then a boarding action can be attempted. If the ships are docked, then the attackers may cross over safely via airlocks; if the ships are merely adjacent, then the attackers must use thruster packs or small craft to cross over — and while crossing, the attackers may be attacked with point defense weapons or by firing sand. Once across, boarding actions can be resolved using the personal combat rules or the abstract boarding rules.

Dock with Another Vessel is the pilot’s half of the same manoeuvre. The pilot must make a successful Average(+0) Pilot check; if the other ship does not wish to be docked with, then make opposed Pilot checks, and the ship trying to dock suffers a −2 DM. When docked, boarding actions can take place.

Break Pursuit and Pursuit are the pair that decide who dictates the fight. If a pilot makes a successful opposed Pilot skill check against another vessel within Short or Close range travelling at the same speed as the pilot’s vessel, the successful pilot has placed his vessel in pursuit of his target, maintaining the current range and matching the target ship move for move. Once a pursuit has been established, it must be maintained each turn to take advantage of the position — maintaining a pursuit is a significant action that does not require a skill check.

The pursuit bonus

a cumulative DM+1 to hit for each turn after the first that pursuit is maintained, to a maximum of DM+4

That accumulation is why breaking pursuit is urgent rather than tidy. The bonus is not applied to the pursuing ship in general — it is to hit when attacking the vessel being pursued — and it takes five turns of held pursuit to reach the cap. Breaking the pursuit does not reduce it; it removes it, all of it, at once.

Calculate Jump Plot is how a fight ends without anybody winning it. The navigator can hastily calculate a Jump Plot as a significant action in space combat. Normally an Easy (+4) Education-based Navigation skill check, hastening it to fit within one space combat turn imposes a DM-1 on the skill check.

A hasty jump plot

Easy (+4) Education-based Navigation, with a DM-1 for hastening it into one turn

A DM-1 on an Easy check is a small price, and that is the point: running away is cheap to attempt and the pressure it creates is what most space fights are actually about. The attacker is not trying to destroy you before you die — they are trying to destroy you before your navigator finishes.

Coordinate Crew and Increase Initiative are the Captain’s two. For Coordinate Crew the Captain makes an Average(+0) Leadership skill check and gains a pool of points equal to the Effect of the skill check, minimum of 1, which he can distribute to individual crew members as DMs — granting a +1 DM per point — on skill or ability checks during the combat turn. For Increase Initiative the Captain may make a Leadership check and increase the Initiative of his vessel by the Effect of the check; this increase only applies for the following turn.

The minimum of 1 on Coordinate Crew is worth noticing. Even a failed Leadership check hands the captain a point to give away, so coordinating is never wasted — while Increase Initiative has no floor and buys nothing on a failure, and what it buys on a success lasts exactly one turn.

Electronic Warfare is the sensors operator’s, and it does two different jobs. A sensors operator may attempt to jam radio communications and sensor locks by making an opposed Intelligence-based Comms check against the sensors operator of the opposing vessel; electronic warfare can be used to break sensor locks. Alternatively, it can be used to attack smart missiles that are targeting the ship: the sensors operator makes a Difficult (−2) Comms check and, if successful, a single attacking smart missile ceases attacking. He may continue making checks to disable smart missiles until he fails one, with a cumulative −1 DM each time.

Evasive Manoeuvres is the pilot’s defensive action. The pilot operates the vessel in an erratic manner in an attempt to avoid being hit by opposing weapons fire, making an Average(+0) Pilot skill check. If successful, any attack rolls targeting the pilot’s vessel suffer a DM-1 penalty, or DM-2 with an Exceptional Success.

Line Up the Shot is its mirror image, and the pilot cannot have both. A pilot may attempt to aid his gunners by providing a stable firing platform along an optimum attack vector: he makes a Pilot check to aid his gunners, granting a DM+1 on all attack rolls this turn with a success, or a DM+2 with an Exceptional Success. One significant action, one pilot — so every turn the pilot chooses between being harder to hit and being better at hitting.

Intercept Enemy Communications is the sensors operator’s long shot and the Captain’s follow-up. The sensors operator may attempt to intercept enemy communications with a Difficult(-2) Comms skill check, and encryption, if any, must also be broken. The Captain may then make an Easy (+4) Tactics check to gain an advantage from intercepted communications; if successful, the Captain gains knowledge of the enemy’s dispositions or intentions, which translates to a one-time DM+4 bonus to any skill check affecting the enemy. Of course, the enemy must have communications for them to be intercepted.

Maintain Communications sounds like housekeeping and is a precondition for fighting as a group at all. The sensors operator can establish and maintain communications between allied vessels with a Routine(+2) Comms skill check. If there is significant interference or a lot of communications going on — bad comm discipline among a fleet, for instance — treat as Considerable Noise (DM-2), and deliberate comms jamming requires an opposed Comms skill check with the jammer. If reliable communications are not established, vessels cannot act in concert, and Tactics skill cannot be applied.

That last clause is what makes electronic warfare worth a whole crew position. Tactics is the skill the initiative roll is decided by and the skill an abstract boarding action is fought with; jam the enemy’s communications and neither is available to them.

Ram is a potentially suicidal manoeuvre in which a pilot intentionally crashes his vessel into the hull of another vessel. This action may only be attempted at Close range, and only if the ramming vessel is moving faster than the target. To successfully ram another vessel requires an opposed Pilot skill check between both vessels. A collision inflicts 1D6 damage for every point of difference in speed between the two vessels.

Ramming damage

1D6 for every point of difference in speed between the two vessels

Range Check is the Navigator’s, and it is how a ship changes the band it is fighting in. The Navigator makes an opposed Navigation skill check with another vessel; the vessel with the highest result may elect to increase, decrease, or maintain the range between the vessels for the round. Given what the attack difficulties table does to every weapon, winning that opposed check is often worth more than a shot.

Reload Weapons System is available to anyone. A crew member — usually the gunner — may spend the round reloading one spent missile rack, one spent sandcaster or other individual weapon system. One system per action, which is what makes a ship with several spent racks spend several turns.

Repair Damaged System is damage control’s. A character on damage control may attempt to repair a damaged system by making an Education-based Mechanics check; if the check is successful, the Effect determines how many hits are repaired.

A ship with repair drones and the Auto-Repair software also makes one or two repair checks on the vessel’s turn, unless it is being used to assist other repair attempts, and the standard Auto-Repair software makes the check with a +1 DM. These are battlefield repairs only and will break down as soon as the battle is over unless repaired properly — so the hits you put back during a fight are a loan against the yard bill, not a cure.

Sensor Targeting is the sensors operator’s contribution to everyone else’s shooting. He may attempt to spend the turn providing improved fire control and targeting data to the gunners, making an Education-based Comms skill check against the target’s Sensor Jamming rating, for each vessel that is to be targeted. If successful, all gunners on the vessel gain a DM+1 bonus to their attacks this turn, or a DM+2 on an Exceptional Success.

When using missiles the initial attack gets this bonus — the individual missile to-hit rolls do not benefit directly, and smart missiles are unaffected. That is the same distinction the missiles section turns on: the launch check and the arrival roll are two different throws, and a modifier that helps one need not help the other.

Miscellaneous is the catch-all, and it has a stated boundary rather than being left to taste alone. A character may make a skill check or do something else as a significant action when such an action requires the character’s full attention, concentration, complicated physical actions or some combination thereof — and any skill check with a time interval of 1-6 minutes is simply considered a significant action during space combat.

Four things beyond the action list are printed as special considerations in space combat: the abstract boarding rules, which are published in the boarding section of this chapter; the missile rules; the planetary manoeuvres; and the special weapon rules — each of which has its own section here. None of the four is an ordinary action. The first replaces a whole personal combat sequence with a single opposed check, the second is the only weapon whose damage lands in a later turn than the one that fired it, the third turns a world into terrain, and the fourth is the list of weapons that break the standard damage sequence.

Reference rule — not active yet

Responding to an attack.

As in personal combat, reactions are actions taken immediately in response to the action of another. A ship may react to incoming attacks in three situations: being targeted by a beam attack, an incoming missile, and an attempted boarding.

The ship's Initiative determines how many times it may react in a round. That is the second job Initiative does in this chapter and it is easy to miss behind the first: a high Initiative is not only acting sooner, it is being able to defend yourself more often between your own turns.

Screen damage reduction

2D6 + the operator's Screens skill

Point defence carries an important restriction. Missiles can only be destroyed in the moments before they strike the spacecraft, as they are too small and fast-moving to effectively target at greater ranges — so you cannot shoot down a salvo on its way in over two turns, only in the instant it arrives. That is what makes the missile flight time a real threat rather than a warning.

Two of the reactions do double duty against boarders. Sand can also be directed against incoming boarding parties: if the sand attack is successful, each target in the boarding party takes 8D6 damage. And point defense can also be used to attack incoming boarders in the same way. That is what the boarding action means when it says attackers crossing between ships may be attacked with point defense weapons or by firing sand.

Nuclear dampers also remove the automatic radiation hit from nuclear missile attacks — which is a separate benefit from the damage reduction, and the only defence in the chapter that touches the radiation crew hits the special weapon rules attach to four different weapons.

Reference rule — not active yet

Taking a ship with people rather than guns.

In circumstances when the Referee may wish to resolve a boarding action without resorting to the personal combat rules, an alternative method is suggested. On each round of a boarding action, the attacking Chief Security Officer — or Captain, if the CSO is down or not appointed — makes an opposed Intelligence-based Tactics skill check against the Chief Security Officer, or Captain, of the defenders.

The results of each round depend on who wins and the degree of success achieved by the winner of the opposed check. This is an optional rule and it is a shortcut rather than a different outcome: the alternative is playing the fight out with the personal combat rules, one corridor at a time, while the ship battle around it continues in kiloseconds.

Notice that the ship being fought over takes damage in three of the four cells. An ordinary success by either side puts one Single Hit of internal damage into it, and an exceptional attacker success does 2D6 — so the prize is being wrecked while it is being won, and a long boarding fight can leave the winner with a hull nobody wants.

The DM+2 for winning a round is what makes a boarding action snowball. Win once and the next opposed check is easier, which makes winning it more likely, which makes the one after that easier still — the abstract rules are built so a boarding is decided in a few rounds rather than grinding.

Defender loses reactions this round is the harshest single line in the table. A ship that cannot react cannot dodge, cannot fire sand, cannot use point defence and cannot trigger screens — so an attacker who wins the boarding round has also, for that round, disarmed the ship’s entire defensive suite against everything else shooting at it.

Reference rule — not active yet

Salvos, flight time and point defence.

Unlike beam weapons, which travel at the speed of light and so hit the enemy vessel almost instantly, missile weapons take time to cross the gulf of space. Missiles travel at Thrust 10 towards their designated target, and they cannot be used at Adjacent or Close range.

Their position can either be tracked as additional craft in the battle or, for the sake of simplicity, they can be assumed to strike after a number of turns dependent on launch range. The simple version is the one the table below gives, and it is the one this chapter is written around.

The shape of that table is the thing to take away: a missile launched on a FAILED check is still a missile in flight. Failing the launch does not waste the shot, it makes the missile worse — an 11+ instead of a 6+ — and it still has to be shot down or dodged when it arrives. That is unlike every beam weapon in the chapter, where a missed attack is simply over.

Smart missiles change the arithmetic in two ways. The missile to-hit roll for smart missiles is always 8+, regardless of the launch check — so a bad launch is not punished and a superb one is not rewarded — and if they miss they make another attack every turn until they are destroyed with point defense, jammed with ECM, run out of fuel or are otherwise dissuaded. A smart missile that misses is still a problem next turn.

That is why the sensors operator’s two anti-missile jobs exist. Sensor Targeting helps the initial launch and not the individual to-hit rolls, and smart missiles are unaffected by it altogether; Electronic Warfare is the reverse, and is the action that shuts a smart missile down for good.

Reference rule — not active yet

Fighting near a world.

Within close range of a planet, certain planetary manoeuvres become possible. Both of them are significant actions for the pilot, and both of them are ways of using a world as terrain.

Orbital Insertion: the pilot may attempt to insert the ship into orbit around a planet. This is a significant action requiring a Routine(+2) Pilot skill check. If an orbital insertion fails, the ship fails to enter the proper orbit, and the orbit will steadily begin to decay, drawing the ship towards the planet’s atmosphere in an uncontrolled reentry.

Atmospheric Entry: the pilot may attempt to transition the ship out of orbit and into the atmosphere of a planet. This is a significant action with an Average (+0) Pilot skill check, with any applicable DMs from the Atmospheric Entry table. Exotic, Corrosive, or Insidious atmospheres should be treated as Standard unless specified otherwise.

The table reads off two digits of the world profile: size and atmosphere. Size works the way you would expect — a big world pulls harder, so Size 9 or above is a DM -2 and Size 4 or below is a DM +2. Atmosphere is the more interesting one, because a world with Atmosphere 1 or less is an Auto Success: there is effectively nothing to enter, so the manoeuvre is not a manoeuvre.

The two atmosphere rows that carry a modifier are asymmetric on purpose. Thin and standard atmospheres — 2 to 5, and the very thin high atmosphere at 14 — are a DM +2, while dense and high-pressure ones at 8-9 and 13 are a DM -2. So the worlds that are easiest to breathe on are the hardest to fall into.

What makes these actions matter in a fight is the failure branch on orbital insertion. A failed insertion does not simply cost the turn — it puts the ship on a decaying orbit heading for an uncontrolled reentry, which turns a manoeuvre into a deadline. A pilot who tries to slingshot out of a fight and misses has swapped one problem for a worse and more urgent one.

Reference rule — not active yet

The weapons that do not follow the ordinary rules.

Several types of weapons have their own rules. Each of the five below breaks the standard attack-and-damage sequence in its own way, and four of the five do it by adding a radiation crew hit on top of whatever damage they roll.

The meson gun is the one that changes the whole damage procedure rather than adding to it. It ignores armour — so the subtraction step of the damage rules simply does not happen — and it always rolls on the Internal Damage table, which is the column a ship only reaches after its Hull has been wiped out. A meson gun therefore does structure, drive and bridge damage to a fresh ship, and its radiation crew hit is automatic where every other weapon’s is resisted by armour.

The other three radiation weapons all work the same way and armour matters to them twice. Armour subtracts from the damage roll in the ordinary way, and it also applies as a −DM to the bonus radiation hit — so an armoured ship is protected against the crew casualties as well as against the damage, from the same number.

The sandcaster as an attack is a curiosity rather than a threat: Close range only, one point of damage. Against a ship that single point will not survive the armour subtraction on anything with plating. Where it does bite is against people — the reactions section gives sand fired at a boarding party 8D6 against each target, which is a personal-scale number and a lethal one.

Reference rule — not active yet

Rolling damage at ship scale.

The effects of damage are determined by subtracting the ship's armor from the damage rolled by the weapon, then consulting the Space Combat Damage table to determine the number of hits inflicted. Then roll on the Space Combat Hit Location table for each hit.

What the damage table is consulted with

the damage rolled by the weapon − the ship's armor

Armour is subtracted once, from the whole damage roll, before the table is read — and the table starts at "0 or less: No damage". So armour is not damage reduction in the usual sense; it is a threshold. A weapon whose damage roll cannot exceed a ship’s armour cannot hurt that ship at all, however many times it hits.

Systems can take a variable number of hits before being destroyed, depending on the system in question, which is why the table counts hits rather than points. A Double Hit is not double damage — it is two hits applied to the SAME location, which is how a single big weapon takes a turret from working to disabled in one shot where two separate small hits would have spread across two locations.

The last two rows are what happens past 44. For every extra three points, one more Single Hit; for every extra six points, one more Double Hit. Both are printed and neither excludes the other, so an enormous hit keeps accumulating hits rather than falling off the end of the table.

Reference rule — not active yet

Losing hull points.

A Hull result on the hit location table reduces the ship's Hull by one. If a ship's Hull is 0, then apply the hits to the location in the same row of the Internal Damage column instead.

A ship can endure one point of Hull damage per fifty tons, rounding down. A ship that runs out of Hull Damage will rapidly be incapacitated — which is the printed consequence, and it is deliberately softer than the structure one: running out of Hull does not destroy the ship, it opens it up.

Hull points a ship can endure

one point per fifty tons, rounding down

The fall-through clause is what makes Hull the outer layer rather than a separate track. Once Hull is 0, a Hull result no longer does nothing — it is read across to the Internal Damage column on the same row of the hit location table, which for the three Hull rows means Structure. So the same die roll that was scraping plating is now taking the ship apart, and nothing else about the attack changed.

Four other locations also end up feeding this track. Turret, M-Drive and Sensors each say Subsequent Hits count as Hull hits, and Armor says a hit on already-zero armour counts as a Hull hit — so a ship that has lost a turret entirely keeps taking Hull damage through the same location, and the destroyed system is not a shield.

Reference rule — not active yet

Losing structure points.

A Structure result reduces the ship's Structure by one. If a ship's Structure is reduced to 0, the ship is destroyed.

A ship can endure one point of Structure damage per fifty tons, rounding down to a minimum of one. A ship that runs out of Structure breaks up and is completely destroyed — this is the track with no ambiguity in it at all, and the only one in the chapter whose zero is final.

Structure points a ship can endure

one point per fifty tons, rounding down to a minimum of one

Six of the nine staged locations end in Structure. Bay, J-Drive, Power Plant, Bridge, Fuel and Hold all say Subsequent Hits count as Structure hits — so once those systems are destroyed, every further hit on them is eating the ship itself. That is the shape of a long fight: the systems go first, and then the wreck of each system becomes another way to lose.

Structure is also the destination of the abstract boarding rules’ internal damage, and of a meson gun’s attacks from the first shot, since a meson gun always rolls on the internal column. There are several routes to this track that never pass through the hull at all.

Reference rule — not active yet

The systems a serious hit takes out.

Every hit rolls 2D6 on the Space Combat Hit Location table, and which column you read is decided by the ship rather than by the attack. Small craft use the Small Craft column; vessels of 100 tons or larger use External Hit (Vessel) until enough damage has wiped out their Hull, and then Internal Hit (Vessel).

Read the External column down and you can see what it is for. Four of its eleven rows are Hull — 2, 6, 8 and 12 — and 6 and 8 are two of the three most likely results on 2D6. So an intact ship absorbs most of what it is hit by into the Hull track, and only the tails of the curve reach a system. The Internal column has no Hull in it at all: the same four rows are Structure three times and Bridge once.

The Small Craft column is a third arrangement rather than a variant of either. It keeps Hull on 2, 6 and 8 like the external column, but it has no Sensors row, no Bay and no Structure — instead it puts Hold on 4, Fuel on 5, Turret on 9 and Crew on 11. A small craft is a thing with a hold, a fuel tank and people in it, and the table is shaped accordingly.

Nine of the locations degrade in three stages and then fall through to another track. Most often the first hit is a penalty, the second disables and the third destroys — that is exactly the shape of Turret, Bay, J-Drive and Sensors — and everything after the third is counted somewhere else. Five of the nine depart from it, and the paragraphs after the table name each departure.

Two of the nine end the fight without destroying the ship, and they are the two nobody plans for. A jump drive disabled on the second hit means nobody escapes — every route out of a space battle other than surrender runs through the J-drive. A fuel tank destroyed on the third means nobody gets home, and the second hit already took a tenth to six tenths of what was in it.

The bridge is the one that takes the most away at once. Disabled, the ship cannot take any Pilot or Sensor actions, cannot jump, and every attack it makes suffers a –2 DM — which is most of the significant action list gone in a single hit, and it stays gone until the bridge is repaired. It is also one of the five that break the penalty-disable-destroy shape, and it breaks it at the top: the FIRST bridge hit is not a penalty at all, it is a crew hit on the Normal Damage column. The Power Plant breaks it in the middle the same way — its second hit is a crew hit, on the Radiation column, rather than a disabling. The M-drive is the strangest: its second hit reduces thrust by 50%, applied after a first hit that already reduced it by one, and the drive is not disabled until the third. Fuel’s second hit destroys stored fuel rather than disabling anything, and the Hold’s second hit is word for word its first.

Three of the locations are not staged at all. Hull and Structure each reduce their own pool by one, and Armor reduces the ship’s armor by one — with the note that if the ship’s armor is already 0, an Armor result counts as a Hull hit instead. So armour is a consumable in a long fight, and every point of it that is shot away makes every subsequent damage roll worse.

Crew is the last of the thirteen named locations — the nine staged ones above, the three unstaged, and Crew itself, which is exactly the set of distinct names the hit location table’s three columns hold between them. It is also the one that hurts the players themselves rather than the ship. Each hit on the crew indicates that radiation or flying debris has injured one or more crew: roll 2D6 on the appropriate column on the Crew Damage table.

The two columns are not two severities of the same thing; which one is rolled is decided by what caused the hit. The Radiation column is what the special weapon rules’ bonus radiation hits use, what a power plant’s second hit uses, and what a nuclear missile adds — while the Normal column is what a bridge hit uses and what ordinary flying debris does.

Note the shape of the curve. On 2D6 a result of 4 or less is common and costs nothing, 5–10 hurts one random person, and only 11 and 12 reach everybody — but when they do, they reach EVERYBODY, which on a small crew is the whole ship’s complement taking 2D6 or 4D6 at once. What that damage does to a character is the personal combat chapter’s business, not this table’s — this one only says how much and to how many.

Reference rule — not active yet

Scaling a ship weapon against a person.

Ship weapons suffer a DM -4 to hit a specific target on the personal combat scale. The Scaling Damage table covers the damage inflicted on the personal combat scale when ship weapons strike personal-scale targets.

To hit a specific personal-scale target with a ship weapon

the attack roll, with a DM -4

The multiplier is the whole rule. Personal combat damage comes off characteristics that run in single digits, and the smallest MULTIPLIED entry here is 1D6x50 — between 50 and 300. There is no meaningful difference between the weakest multiplied weapon on this table and the strongest, as far as the person being shot at is concerned. A turret firing on people is not a combat, it is an outcome.

The sandcaster is the one exception and the reason the table is worth consulting at all. It alone has no multiplier: 8D6, which is the same number the reactions section gives for sand fired at a boarding party. That is a survivable-in-principle amount of damage from a ship weapon, and it is the only entry on this table that is.

Four entries add 4D6x10 rads on top of their damage — the meson gun, the nuclear missile and both particle beams — which is the same radiation the special weapon rules attach at ship scale, arriving here as a personal-scale dose. And the particle beam is the one weapon printed twice, at 6D6x50 for a bay and 3D6x50 for a turret, so the mounting matters.

The DM -4 is worth reading precisely: it is to hit a SPECIFIC target on the personal combat scale. A ship weapon fired at a crowd, a building or a landscape is not covered by that penalty, which is written for the case of picking one person out. The penalty is the difficulty of aiming a ship’s gun at something person-sized, not a penalty for shooting downwards.