Okay, let's explore 5-samples for starships and 5 more for capital ships. I'll need some time to wrap my head around that one, since it skews things that seemed to already work for Wes before. Even though the examples were provisional, I still feel we ought to have a benchmark Wes can agree to on submission.
Another thing I wanted to revisit:
Moving on to adapting the scaling... From the way I was looking at it, I was actually sort of enjoying using something vaguely analogous to 1/5 steps. The initial exploration was 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%, 20%, 0% with it scaling in the opposite direction as well, admittedly this was a much more gradual transition than the original one so I modified it. What I found was that if you keep going from four steps to five, things weren't too bad. At present we go from 100% to 50%, 25%, and finish off at 12.5% from there I considered adding on 6.5% instead of dropping to nothing seemed like a decent way to give a bit more breathing room before weapons became ineffective. This worked for me, I'm not sure if it would be agreeable to others though. (Conversely it would increase from 100% to 150%, 200%, 300%, 450%, using a multiplier of 1.5 except for the conversion between 150 to 200)
Lethality, in the article, currently stands as:
4 Below Negligible (nothing significant)
3 Below Light damage (around 12.5% of expected damage)
2 Below Moderate Damage ( around 25% of expected damage)
1 Below Heavy Damage (around 50% of expected damage)
Equal Potentially lethal
1 Above Potentially lethal ( around 150% of expected damage)
2 Above Quite lethal (around 200% of expected damage)
3 Above Very lethal (around 300% of expected damage)
4 Above Assuredly lethal (instant destruction)
Following the idea that we commit to a sample size of 5 for starship and capital ship, it kind of feels like we nee dto finalize this 5-across thing with lethality.
Another thing I was thinking about was making potentially lethal damage not 100% of expected lethality, but a number lower than that that a GM can feel free to fudge in favor or not in favor of... and also perhaps a nice visual aid to how barrier damage could be interpreted.
...and then I tried to build a list for a total of five items above and below, and I was struck by the granularity of it. I kind of flung my hands in the air and gave up on it, but it doesn't stop that the information needs to be communicated. That it needs to be kept simple. But still needs to convey examples. Perhaps more "show" and less "tell". This article has a lot of "tell" already.
So, I revisit what's actually written in the wiki for Lethality here. Something that might replace the table.
So, striking a person with a weapon that comes equal with the defense it faces might cause a wound which, depending on what kind of wound it is, could be life-threatening. Then as the gap between weapon and protection leaves the latter wanting, this could get worse: from complete penetration and gaping wounds, to traumatic injuries like losing limbs, evisceration and such. At an extreme once the gap is five classes wide, you could expect incineration via energy weapon and explosively losing body parts via projectile trauma.
But a person is a soft target, at the bottom rung of our listing. What about spaceships?
Within a difference of 5 classes, ships can credibly sustain damage conductive to their destruction. From the lower edge cases, you might expect only nicks and scrapes on the hull as a result, but as weapons become more competitive against the target, you can expect causing more signifiant pockmarks and gouges, twists, tears and cratters into it... until the weapon's class comes equal with the vessel's representative class, where you can reasonably expect that landing a hit might cause a hull breach. Depending on where that hull breach happens, this could cripple the ship. Then as weapons become better and more lethal in comparison to the target, the damage gets worse: there could be compartment-wide damage, wide sections opening up to space, loss of major structural components on-hit, until we could expect a weapon rated 5 or above the target to destroy the vessel if it was hit centermass.
The message I wanted to get across was that the damage gets less worse the more the weapon is under the target's class, and the worse it gets, while showing that the range before ineffectuality/overkill is a 5 class gap. I also tried to include comparative description of the kind DocTomoe first introduced here.
Then, I was thinking about examples which might help build a better picture of this.
Example of an equal potentially lethal anti-personnel outcomes:
Joe and Steve put on their hockey masks and storm into the drug store, threatening the clerk with knives. The matronly woman behind the cash register though loses no time in fishing out a Little Killer - a small concealable pistol - and fires at Steve straight in the chest. The man collapsed limply with a muted grunt as Joe's eyes widened and he promptly made to flee the drugstore. The woman still managed to draw a bead on him and he felt burning pain flare across his shoulder before he made it to the exit.
It was only once he reached the relative safety of an alley that he stop to look at his shoulder wound. The bullet had not gone through, and the wound was bleeding rather profusely, which made him worry that an artery might have taken damage. He hurried to a clinic he knew where the staff knew better to ask questions.
Example of less than lethal and worst than lethal anti-starship outcomes:
The explosion of the NMX Carrier buffeted the squadron of Plumeria gunships that had taken it down on, one of their numbers flying in too close, too recklessly, ended up seeing its Combined Field System barrier failing from the abuse.
Scenting blood, an NMX scoutship jousted past the vulnerable Yamataian vessel and both vessels opened against each other with broadsides. The Plumeria came much worse from the exchange, as the NMX scoutship's anti-fighter turrets marred its enemy's smooth hull with smelted black scars, its anti-ship turrets destroyed one of their counterparts on the Plumeria's dorsal hull while another shattered through the pylon-mounted CFS shield-shaped emitter. Most telling, though, was the handiwork of the NMX scout's underslung turreted positron cannon which also managed a hit. Struck straight in the ventral front, the resulting anti-matter explosion opened up most of the vessel's engineering components to space.
It's beating heart stilled, the crippled gunship drifted listlessly, its surviving crew likely not able to bring the vessel back to life before the NMX Scout swung around to make another pass.
Though briefly isolated, the Plumeria was fortunately not alone, and the rest of its squadron came around to give the beleaguered vessel the time it needed to limp back under its own power.
How do those sound? Would that be better than the current table and very formal wording? I notice that the current DR article has much less formal wording too (maybe we're trying too hard and trying to make it too technical is making it sound more complicated than it is).