Talk:After Ether: Ascension

Strategic movement speeds for ships and aircraft.

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 feature in space, archetypically vast glowing nebula spanning light-years but more commonly local bubbles of ejected gas. These tend to distort sensor return, making long-range targeting dificult. Effect: -2 to hit per cumulative range bracket, +25% stealth
• Cloud (Dust): Large clouds of dust provide effective obscurant even in deep space. Systems with pervasive dustclouds are often raider havens, though this works both ways and the hunter can easily become the hunted in such murky realms. Effect: Large boost to base stealth.
• Cloud (Ion): Ion clouds (or ion storms) are normally the result of solar winds and magnetic fields working in conjuncture, leading to massive built-up electrical charges and cinematic lightning. Effect: Roll twice for criticals, missiles/torpedoes have a 25% chance of automatic failure.
• 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. Effect: -1 energy weapon damage and -2 sensors per cumulative range bracket
• Cloud (Interference): These are clouds that have strong and unusual phenomenae, such as astrophysical masers and other 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'. Effect: Tech bonuses are inverted.
• 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. Effect: 1 damage/round (2 on cruiser, 3 on capship, 4+ bigger). 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