Ascend Vehicles & Ships

These are preliminary thoughts of vehicle/ship stats, combat and miscellaneous gameplay.

General view

Milieus

Sword and Starship

+High speed

+Lots of carrying (mecha, boarding pods, strike witches, space marines, etc)

+Heroism (ability to be highly upgraded)

-Primary Firepower (guns)

-Custom-built

Heavy Metal

+Primary Firepower (guns)

+Defenses

+Mass-producible

-Slow

-Extended Firepower

-Systems

Infospace

+Extended Firepower (missiles, torpedoes, 'special' weapons)

+Systems (Sensors, Targeting, ECM, etc)

+Stealth

-Defenses

-Heroism (Replaceable)

Stats

Not necessarily comprehensive, or universally applicable.

• Defense: The target number to hit
• Shields/Armor: These reduce all damage inflicted. Some weapons or effects ignore some/all of one or the other - or both.
• Hits: How much damage must be accumulated before structural damage (ie, loss of Structure Points) occurs.
• Damage Threshold: The amount of damage (after armor) that must be done in a single attack to inflict multiple Structure Points of damage. (number TBD)
• Critical Threshold: A higher threshold to inflict more Structure Points.
• Annihilation Threshold: A value at which point the vehicle/ship suffers a rapid and uncontrolled autodisassembly - boom, magazine hit or reactor containment breach.
• Structure Points: A tracker of 'mega-hits'. Once these are exhausted the vehicle is literally shot to shit and can no longer operate in any meaningful manner - save perhaps as cover.
• Passive Detection: Eh, lets you detect stuff.
• Active Detection: Shine a light into the darkness. Higher value than passive, but also lights you up.
• ECM: How exactly this plays into stuff has not yet been decided, but probably means something.
• Signature: The measure of how easy or difficult it is to spot your unit.
• Emissions: A value that stacks onto Signature (ie, making you more easy to be spotted) representing the waste energy - thermal, etheric, electromagnetic, psionic, etc - of your unit. See Stealth and Detection for more detail.
• Energy: How much etheric energy your unit generates each turn, presumably by turning condensed etheric fuel (such as EAM) into useful electro-etheric energy. Any not spent (for whatever reason) vanishes at the end of the turn unless stored in a capacitor.
• Capacitor: A power storage medium.

Tags

• Kinetic: Damage done via kinetic/momentum transfer, normally by some sort of shell or bullet.
• Energy: Damage done via energy discharge. Lasers, plasma guns, lightning arcs.
• Pattern: Damage done via a direct attack on the very substance - polymorph, nanotech, etc.
• Psionic: Damage done to minds and computer systems.
• Guided: Weapon with onboard seeking system.
• Mega Vehicle: The unit in question is a large, multicompartment vehicle generally massing thousands of tons. Normally some sort of (space)ship, but mobile gun forts and land dreads also count.

Effects

• Armor Piercing X: Reduced Armor by X
• Armor Ignoring: Ignores all Armor
• Shield Piercing X: Reduce Shields by X
• Shield Ignoring: Ignores all Shields
• Powerful X: Multiply damage inflicted to Hits after shields/armor is multiplied by X.
• Shattering X: Inflicts X additional Structural damage if at least one point of Structural damage is inflicted by this attack.
• Mass Reactive: Inflicts additional Hits equal to the number of remaining Structural Points.
• Ionize X: Remove X points of power from the target.
• Guided: Gets a to-hit on target lock.
• ROF X: The weapon can attack X times per turn
• Charge X: Requires X turns of being charged before it can be fired. Charge 0 means that it activates at the end of the current initiative order.
• Overheat X: After firing/activating, requires X turns to cool down before it can be used again.
• Emissions X: Increases Emissions by X. Generally paired with Charge. ("Energy spike detected!")
• Alpha Capacitor X: The weapon or system can store X additional shots at the usual energy demand and can fire them in one turn.

Rules

General Stuff

Most systems can consume extra energy to achieve higher damage and/or added effects (both numerical and status). Some possible examples:

A beam cannon might be able to spend extra energy to gain the ability to ignore a certain amount of armor.

ECM emitters might be able to spend extra energy to scramble enemy computer systems.

engines might be able to spend extra energy to perform evasive maneuvers, making the vehicle difficult to hit.

In addition to drawing extra energy out of the capacitor or shunting energy from other, shutdown systems, systems can also be overcharged by feeding them energy normally but not firing/acting. This means they will progressively build to their max charge over one or more turns of inactivity. If you choose not to fire/activate upon reaching full charge, holding the charge will inflict a hit of damage every turn - per base power consumed, and the system must also be continually fed to maintain the charge.

Systems that are functioning unless turned off (such as shields or engines) cannot be progressively overcharged - they use the power as fast as it is fed to them.

Scaling

Vehicles (fighters, tanks, mecha, etc) and Mega Vehicles (wet-navy and space ships, land dreadnoughts, etc) operate on nominally the same scale. The primary differentiation is damage scaling, which is currently set at a 5x modifier both directions.

In effect, all weapons that are Vehicle scale have an effective Powerful 1/5 against Mega Vehicles, meaning all damage inflicted to these targets after shields/armor is reduced to 1/5th. Likewise, Mega-scale weapons have an effective Powerful 5 against regularly sized vehicles.

In cases where a weapon upscaling has Powerful, it is applied as a multiplier as normal after the initial 1/5th. Thus Powerful 2 would have an effect of reducing damage to 2/5th against that space battleship, while Powerful 5 would bring it up to 5/5th. Most weapons actually effective against larger warships will be Mega scale ones that are specifically designed for this task, such as bombs or torpedoes.

The converse situation when a weapon with Powerful is downscaling, the intrinsic level of Powerful is merely added to the bonus from downscaling. Thus Powerful 2 would become Powerful 7, and Powerful 5 would become Powerful 10. This is both to represent the fact that much of the weapon's damage will simply be lost against a small target and to give the vehicle in question a possible chance at survival.

Stealth and Detection

Passive detection is done by rolling/comparing the passive detection stat to the target's signature + emissions.

Active detection is done by using the active detection stat against the target's signature. The Emission stat is disregarded in this case, because active sensors are specifically looking for radiated emissions which will generally overwhelm waste emissions.

Active detection allows for locks and other useful status effects - passives may be able to achieve these, but will be more difficult.

Units that have the Silent Running ability can enter Silent Running, which deactivates most/all power generators and leaves the unit operating entirely on capacitor power. This brings the unit's emissions down to a minimal level, making it quite stealthy against all but a determined adversary. Unfortunately, with the powerplants cold it will also only have limited endurance before it must reactivate them to recharge.

Misc Ideas

• Variable shields; can double strength of shields in one arc but halves/drops shields on all others.
• Induction coils; target an enemy and he takes damage based on how much is in his capacitor. Possibly gets some energy out of it, too.

Test Vehicles

Vehicles

Type-303 Planetary Strider
Ice Clade

• Heavy Metal

Heavy vehicle

Light Shields

Light Armor

2x Railgun

Missile Pod

Beam gun (Light/Haywire)

Stompy legs

Walker (Jumper)

Arms (Weak)

Thrusters (Space)

'Screecher' Superiority Fighter
Cancer Wizards

• Sword and Starship (biotech stand-in)

Fighter

light Armor (reduced weight)

Light missiles

Giant scythe

High output jets

Agile

life force capacitor charged for release of healing spell

Cheap, expendible

Ships

Torpedo Skyram Thunderchild
Craciy

• Pike and Spell

Small warship

Force Bubble (variable propulsion/shielding)

Forward Armor

Adamant Ram Prow

2x Rocket Torpedoes

1x Deck gun battery

1x Heat Rays (variable searchlight)

Boarding Party

Force Bubble (variable propulsion/shielding

Smokescreen (consumable)

Ship Spirit

Garfresia
Lost Ground

• Sword and Starship

Medium warship

No Shields

Heavy Armor (anti-energy)

Structural Reinforcement (regeneration)

1x heavy gap-cooled beam cannon (improved damage when not taking energy damage)

3x light gap-cooled beam cannons (improved damage when not taking energy damage)

Crima Ram

Big Magic Circuit

Hangar (4-12)

Cargo (small group)

Transformable for mission requirements

Aerodynamic

Big EAM drive

Ship Spirit

Lots of extra powerplants

Capacitor

Kotor superbattleship
Belmar

• Heavy Metal

Super warship

Heavy Shields

Heavy Armor

4x superheavy beam cannons (auxillary solid ammo; armor piercing and beehive)

1x Long range SAM system

Lots of secondaries

Piles of flak guns

Small hangar (scouts)

Lots of plasma rockets

Enhanced sensors

Enhanced radio/jammer system

The Star Doom
Dread Pirate Hrang of Phoenix Nord or possibly the Jade Fleet

• Infospace

Super warship

Heavy shields

Super Cannon (Shattering, Superweapon)

4x all-purpose missiles

6x vector cannons

Large hangar

Large cargo (vector trap)

Forcefield drive

Tactical teleporter

Heavy ECM

Baroque Masthead

Cascade series command cruiser
Thetis Federation

• Infospace

Medium warship

Medium shields

Light armor

1x Heavy Beam System (Sniper, Ortillery, variable armor piercing/area)

2x Vector cannons 'Medusa Array' (Dual-Purpose, Alpha Capacitor)

CIWS

Massive antiship missile cluster (Powerful, Long Range, Semi-Slaved)

Gundrones

Large hangar

Parametric Drive

Heavy ECM

Enhanced Sensors (LORELEI system)

Datawarfare Projector

Capacitor