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The CyberWolfe's Den

Hull and Stress Rating

Your basic hull is built to withstand 1G of acceleration. If you want more than that, your hull will have to be reinforced to handle the added stress. For each turn you exceed your hull's stress rating, your ship will take 1D10+1D10 per G in damage. (A 2G hull under 5G's accel would take 1D10+[5-2=3]D10 or 4D10 damage per turn.) When your ship's SDP is down by half, you can expect pressure leaks and things flying off the bulkheads. At one quarter SDP, those things flying off the bulkheads are hull plates - good luck getting to a vac suit.

Armor and Shields

Armor is welded to your hull, and is there mainly to keep all that random crap floating around in space from puncturing your lungs, but it comes in handy in a firefight as well. Armor is rated in SSP, and works just like SP.

Most ships also carry shields, which are an energy field designed to do the same thing, only it can be fixed a whole lot easier. Shields are ablative, but they also regenerate. For every combat round that you take no damage, your shields will regenerate 1 point of SP to all locations, not to exceed maximum.

In combat, you subtract the shield's SSP, then the armor's SSP - any remaining damage is applied to your ship's SDP at that location. If the SDP is overcome, then you need...

Compartmentalization

This reflects the percentage of vacuum-tight hatches in your ship. When a pressure leak is detected, ship's computer automatically closes any vacuum-tight doors in the area to prevent loss of atmosphere. These hatches can then later be unsealed to perform repairs, or they can be sealed manually from any control station if you think you may be headed for a furball.

Lifesystem

This machinery provides you and your crew with light, heat and breathable, pressurized atmosphere. A full lifesystem contains oxygen tanks and CO₂ scrubbers to keep it fresh, and is rated for the number of people it can support. A limited lifesystem, such as that found in starfighters or shuttlecraft, will not have the scrubbers and must be recharged with fresh atmosphere when depleted.

If it becomes necessary to overload your system, it is possible to de-pressurize unoccupied portions of the ship (cargo holds, hangar bays, etc.) to compensate for short periods of time.

Power Generation

-Powerplants- Great leaps have been made in nuclear power by this time, with plants boasting upwards of 75% efficiency. A powerplant is rated in Megawatts of power produced, and you should plan in a contingency percentage to ensure safe operation. I.E., if your systems total up to 300MW total draw, you should purchase a plant capable of producing a minimum of 330MW. Even so, there may come a time when combat or accident may limit the amount of energy your powerplant can produce. In this event, it is possible to shut down some systems to compensate.

-Capacitors- Some of your ship's systems, such as Hyperdrives, require short bursts of power to operate. Capacitors allow you to store energy the same as batteries, but they allow for the nearly-instantaneous draw that Hyperdrives require. They recharge from the powerplant, using surplus output. Note that there is no way to reduce the amount of time required to recharge your capacitors; if you need a faster charge time, buy better caps.

Hyperdrives

Hyperdrives project an energy field around your ship that translates it into another...space...is the only way to describe it. Once there, travel is much like that in realspace, with a couple of exceptions. The first is that you are now travelling something like 100 times as fast as you were, which brings along some complications all it's own. Very subtle variations in your course can have tremendous results once you drop out of hyper. One degree of change at realspace speeds over ten seconds may put you off-course by a few thousand miles. Ten seconds in hyper could mean a light-year, and they call that variation a parsec. It's also not a good idea to adjust your velocity, but the ramifications there aren't quite as drastic as long as you maintain enough of a safety margin when plotting your course.

The second problem comes from gravity. As mentioned in the introduction, gravity wells from stars and large planets prevent translation to hyper and will cause you to drop back out in a crash translation. Treat the effects of a crash translation the same as you would for one game turn at 10 G's acceleration, and apply damage accordingly. And remember, just because we call it a crash doesn't mean your ship has stopped - you will continue along your exit vector at your realspace velocity once back in realspace. Hopefully, whatever pulled you out isn't close enough to hit.

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