ATTENTION: This guide is outdated. Please refer to Damage Rating (Version 3) instead.

After countless technology debate threads about how powerful shields and armor actually were or should be, we finally decided to put some stats into the role-play to make ship-to-ship confrontations more understandable. This page is here primarily for use by game masters who wish to determine what damage a ship would take; however, players may find it useful it as well, particularly those in player-versus-player plots in the role-play. This page also gives us a healthy helping of consistency for battles.

The Damage Rating (DR) system is a guideline, not an absolute rule. Actual effects of weapons on ships and such are, in the end, based on the judgments of the Game Master. For automatic weapons, the system is roughly aimed at effectiveness within a small time frame, 10 seconds or so depending on the Game Master's interpretation.

Personnel, vehicles (armor), and starships can use/mount weapons for their appropriate scales, but not the scale above them.

Acronym: PDR - Personal Damage Rating Melee attacks should be determined by the GMs. There's a lot of factor with force involved, so there's no consistent level of damage for melee attacks. Thus we'll not include melee on the DR scale, except for maybe special energy sabers, etc.

Acronym: ADR- Armor Damage Rating or MDR - Mecha Damage Rating

Acronym: SDR - Starship Damage Rating

The damage that a starship may produce overall is not limited. However, the damage it may attempt to produce on a single target 'per turn' of RP is limited to 2x the standard amount of structural points (SP) of the ship's class. For an example, a ship of the 'Very Heavy' class such as a battleship may produce up to 100 SDR on a single target, as the standard amount of structural points is 50. This applies even if this battleship has a total damage output of 300 SDR. In turn, this same ship may attempt to do 100 SDR on three separate targets, but never exceed its limit of 100 SDR on one target.

Each ship class can take about ten hits from its equivalent weapon type. Armor, mecha, and tanks can take about five. The capacity for a vehicle to endure damage is loosely represented under a number of Structural Points (abbreviated SP). The base number of Structural Points a vehicle has is abstractly represented in the tables below:

Personnel damage is determined by the Game Master based on the damage rating and circumstances. Use of modifiers for personal armor is discouraged (too complicated) unless there's a severe tech difference. Feel free to fudge a little on this one.

Various armor types can modify SPs and STL Speeds (See also: Starship Speed Standard).

A ship can only have one armor modifier, regardless of the number of armor materials used.

Shields serve as a temporary, extra layer of protection to protect the ship from incoming attacks. The amount of punishment a shielding system can cope with is usually equal to its base Structural Point value for most major factions; however, if a ship is short on power or uses lower technology, that value would be reduced as the following table shows:

Typically, shields have a stopping value equal to their size class (1 through 5). For example, a light hull's shields will entirely block a very light damage or light damage weapon, but stronger weapons will only be mitigated and the excess attack power would hit the ship's hull. A vessel can improve the stopping power of its shield by transferring more power to one facing of the vessel at the expense of another (A light ship [2] could reduce mitigation on his front shield to 1 and increase his rear shielding to 3 while he is being chased).

Shields, unlike a ship's armor, are much easier to repair. Usually, the absorbing capabilities of a ship's shield system easily recuperate after a battle with a few minutes of downtime. When in battle, it is possible for the ship's technician to restore flagging shielding through diverting power, transferring emergency power to them and so forth - though obviously there is a limit to how many rabbits an engineer and his team of technicians can pull out from his hat.

Threshold describes the amount of damage a shield can endure before bleed through begins to occur.

For example:

Imagine for a moment that we have a power-armor (ADR) with a shield threshold of 3. Firing a weapon with an ADR of 5 at that shield would mean 60% of the attack is over the threshold of what the shield can defend from, meaning the remaining 2ADR would still strike the power-armor but the other 3ADR that were beneath the threshold would not.

In this way, very powerful weapons are still going to damage the unit, since they can protect against so much at any given time.

Ships are allowed to use more than one type of shielding at once, but the total SP shall not exceed the SP of a regular shield system. For example, a ship with one shield system might have 20 SP (Threshold 2), while a dual shielded ship could have two shields that are 10 SP (Threshold 2) each, or 5 SP and 15 SP. Again, the total SP should not give multi-shield ships an advantage.

Multiple shields do not allow a ship to sustain more points of damage. The reason multiple shields are allowed is only to allow defense against multiple weapon types. A ship, regardless of the shield type(s), only has one threshold - equal to their class (1 through 5).

Ships with more than one shield system can still use their complete SP on damage to one shield; to do so, their engineers must transfer power from one shield to the other through roleplaying.

Use the following code for adding ratings to ship articles:

==== Damage Capacity ====
//See [[guide:damage_rating]] for an explanation of the damage system.//

  * Hull: XX
  * Shields: XX (Threshold X)

The Damage Capacity section goes in the Statistics and Performance section, after the Propulsion and Range Section.

Some articles in this wiki may still have an older 1-10 scale Damage Rating on them. Please convert them if you find them.

To convert weapon damage from the old DR to the new DR, divide the old value by 2. If the result is not a whole number, round down to the next whole number. For example: Old DR 9 = New DR 4.