Talk:After Ether: Ascension

Strategic movement speeds for ships and aircraft.
Astral gates (space and planet)
- Higher spellcasting makes for more effective

Strategic Operations

Naval Bases

Bases are the places where your mighty space fleets call home. Their primary effect is providing an operational radius inside which ships (and ground forces, presumably) are properly supplied. Units outside of this suffer penalties due to having to conserve ammo and fuel, overworked crews, delayed maintenance, etc. Bases are built up, with each base rank (just to define how big they are) providing X amount of support. Having too much shit in your base's operational radius also means that the extras suffer penalties, since your dudes only have so many hours in the day and so many fuel trucks.

Natural Harbor: You have a particularly convenient location here, perhaps a naturally-hollowed out asteroid or an ancient Open Palm megastructure fragment. Any fleet facilities at a single point location in this system provide double fleet pool.
Gas Shortage: Local fuel sources are limited to nonexistent, meaning your fleets often have to make do off the jump gate network. All fleet facilities in this system provide half fleet pool to ships not in a gate-connected system.
Echo Sound: Ultrawave transmissivity is particularly good in this system and it is consequently easy to coordinate supply operations at a distance. Any fleet facilities in this system have a +1 effective supply range.
Ion Storms: Communication is bad in this system and ships need to be careful when doing UNREPs or carrying large quantities of volatile fuel and munitions. Any fleet facilities in this system have a -1 effective supply range.
Great Mountain: There is a particularly defensible location in this system, such as a large, sheer valley or massive batholith into which you can place a fleet base. This channels any enemy attack, providing significantly better defensive options.
Gate Nexus: The gates in this system are particularly close together or just conveniently placed. This system counts as 0 jumps for supply range so long as line of supply is being drawn through gate systems. This also applies if the fleet base is in this system.
Gatedown: The gates in this system are a bit balky and delays are common. This system does not count as gate-connected for supply purposes.

Space Weather

Clouds
Clouds are large zones of free-floating matter, generally of the gaseous or microscopic sort. Like familiar atmospheric clouds they are obscurant when large enough, while some also collect dangerous charges of ionization or radiation. While some particularly dense clouds are home to cloudscoop operations, in general their tendency to be haunts of pirates and other unsavory sorts sees most legitimate traffic try to avoid them.

Cloud (Gas): Gas clouds are a common sight in space, ranging from random puffs of dense ether in star ways to the vast nebula that are the landmarks of known space. No matter the size and the composition - which can range from simple water to precipitated ether to cloudy smokes of various noxious chemicals - gas clouds make excellent obscurant. Systems with pervasive gas clouds are often raider havens, though this works both ways and the hunter can easily become the hunted in such murky realms.

Increase stealth.

Cloud (Dust): Large clouds of dust, sand and gravel provide much of the same effect as gas clouds, obscuring and baffling all manner of sensors like the galaxy's largest chaff field. Worse yet, dust fields often hide larger, boulder-sized objects within them and the sheer bulk of matter often present and the necessity to occasionally avoid tumbling debris slows down passing ships.

Increase stealth, -1 spacekeeping.

Cloud (Ion): Ion clouds (or ion storms) are normally the result of high-energy ether collecting into thick banks that eventually spill over in vast conflagrations of energy. While ether clouds are often illuminated by intermittent lightning discharges as charges equalize, ion storms are to these as a raging tempest is to a spring squall. Counterintuitively, it is entirely possible to travel more or less unhindered through an ion storm. Assuming proper precautions are taken, that is.

Decrease firepower and shields

Cloud (Plasma): Bubbles or halos of hot plasma, these are most commonly either high-speed ejected jets or the outer atmosphere of large stars such as Betelgeuse. While they may not be dense enough to inflict damage (see Radiation below) even cool plasma is very effective at blocking energy weapons and sensors.

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Cloud (Vampire): So called not because they are made of millions of miniature vampires but because of how they affect ether, vampire clouds were once one of the true perils of the galaxy. Ships that found themselves inside a vampire cloud soon found their enchantments being sapped and any magic being absorbed into the astrocosmic void. If this was not enough, vampire clouds often herald thin boundaries between the Clara and the Umbra and wise travellers stayed far from them.

All enchantments are stripped off units moving into/through vampire clouds and all spellcasting costs double ether and has a chance of failure. This is the default condition for the Umbra.

Cloud (Gravity): Not actually a 'cloud' save for game purposes, gravity clouds are zones where the local space-time metric is heavily distorted; proximity to a black hole, levistone drifts, space warps. While travelling through such areas is not necessarily dangerous or even difficult, it is often slow and proper navigational precautions are mandatory.

All mobility is halved. Spacekeeping does not mitigate this.

Cloud (Interference): These are clouds that have strong and unusual phenomenae, often related to astral proximity and similar cosmological exotica that can wreak havoc on high-tech systems. The tendency of outlaws to use them for protection and to evade pursuit has led to their common nickname of 'pirate clouds'.

A modifier equal to a unit's TL is applied as a global penalty to aptitudes.

Cloud (Radiation): Some of the most dangerous environments, radiation cloudes are massive baths of energy that can swiftly overheat and destroy anything not properly protected against suchlike.

1 damage/round (2 on cruiser, 3 on capship, 4+ bigger), doubled against living targets. Can be mitigated by shields.

Shoals
Shoals are made of much more physical objects, asteroids and comets and other large physical objects.

Shoal (Asteroid): The archetypical asteroid cluster, these are sectors of space dense with free-floating rocks, much moreso than the typical asteroid belt which is in fact still mostly empty space. Effect:
Shoal (Comet): The outer system beyond the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line_(astrophysics)]frost line[/url] tends to be dominated by volatiles as opposed to rocky bodies (comets being 'dirty snowballs' sums this up) and as such, they tend to be bodies with much higher albedo
Archipelago: While most shoals tend to be a chaotic mess of N-body interactions, archipelagos instead full of small bodies that are anchored in some manner, or orbiting in a predictable, cyclical manner.

Storms
Getting caught in a storm always sucks. Hopes it's just rain and not ghost sharknados.

Planetary Environments

Climate (Hot): This is for unpleasantly hot worlds where even the poles tend to be reminiscent of the middle east, Amazon and other 'hot' parts of Earth. While stereotypically desert worlds, that is not a requirement; worlds with equatorial sea temperatures of 50C are still going to be thoroughly uninhabitable too - probably moreso in fact.
Climate (Cold): These are worlds that while having functioning bio- and hydrospheres are nonetheless thoroughly frigid by human standards; equatorial zones are generally comparable to the high arctic (which can mean surprisingly warm summers) but by and large even the nicest places are ones that are cold for much of the year.
Miserable: Some places are simply really miserable. The weather is bad, the climate is unbearable and the food is worse.
Inhospitable: The world in question has no (or a profoundly alien) bio- and/or atmosphere, one that is fundamentally incompatible with human life. At least there's gravity. Worlds such as Mars qualify, as would worlds like Pandora (for very different reasons). Effect: All infrastructure costs are multipled by x2.
Uninhabitable: There is no biosphere, little gravity and often pervasive poisons or solar radiation here. The lunar surface, asteroids and comets, etc. In short, someplace that is absolutely, accept-no-substitutes lethal to human life (and organic life in general). While none of the challenges of living here haven't been solved by technic civilization, that still doesn't make it cheap and convenient. All infrastructure costs are multiplied by x4

Misc Planetary Things

Space Port - The Space Port. Singular. Where most planets have dozens or even hundreds of individual port facilities, this planet has one gigantic hub for import and export goods. Despite what people might think it's actually not a huge boon to trade, rather these sprawling facilities are the domains of iron fisted customs controllers, meant to tightly regulate the passage of goods, passengers and the vessels that carry them. Excellent for security and border control, rather obvious and important target.

Tourist Trap - People come from other places to look around, spend money and then leave. You don't even have to give them anything! It's the best! There's some attraction in this otherwise bland or marginal land that brings visitors and fuels the local economy.

Well of Secrets - It's not that everyone puts all their unsavory yet important things in a bunker beneath a skull-shaped volcanic island, but this area is someplace where someone could be looking for one and still not find it. An excellent location for hidden facilities, secret resistance redoubts and supervillain lairs. Keep in mind it's great for hiding (or losing) things not just because other people find it baffling or impossible, but because everyone does.

Random NPC Concepts

Astraleria

Theme: Pretentious Empire Seething With Temporary Embarrassment
Favored Milieu: Sword and Starship
As far back as recorded history goes, the Nomenian Dynasties that arose on Astraleria have claimed to be the distant inheritors of a stellar empire that once controlled vast swaths of what is now the modern day Panhelios. At least as far back as Ragnarok there hasn't been a trace of any meaningful star faring power on that world and in spite of those facts, it seethes bitterly under the insulting reality of being little more than a blip in the shadow of the Endus Federation. Ostentatious, socially stagnant and as politically inflexible as they are pretentious, the Nomenian great lords have few friends and a huge audience of gleeful detractors. While slow to adopt more effective technology developed by their supposed lessers, Astraleria is a moderately developed industrial society strong enough to deflect attempts of economic imperialism and gain status as an independent, if middling, power.

To some meager credit, Astralerians are a unique phenotype with clearly divergent origins to most other sapients in the region. They are a saurian race with vaguely draconic features, though tending more toward the fanciful and the otherworldly than the ferocious with lithe bodies, streamlined features and vestigial gossamer-like winglets. Despite a long-lived and stable civilization, their repressive society is rife with internal problems and has been sliding into upheaval. Most of this is due to the disastrous ripples of open trade and contact with the more uninhibited worlds of the Panhelios. Reckless self-indulgence was unconscionable for working-class Astralarians on their own world, but in sultry trading outposts, freebooter starships and virtually every other corner of creation reached by free enterprise, vices are plentiful, cheap and encouraged. Emigration of skilled labor in the past few decades has become a crisis, with pockets of booze-swilling ex-patriots appearing in the Federation and other places, with their cheap living and public depredations a source of intense shame to their haughty home world upper class. Utterly ineffective in blunting the problem in the Panhelios, the Astralerian regime has been faltering while attempting to deal with what has now become a cultural invasion at home. How does their so-called superiority look when the people who built the mightiest military force seen in the last thousand years are the same people responsible for beer hats and Darwin Awards?