Faced with an universe in chaos, where technology can make the difference between life and death, rose questions from our roleplayers such as “can my gun kill this thing?” or “how much punishment can my shuttle take?”.

The Damage Rating system is a guideline there to help figure that out. This is its third version¹⁾ and can be abbreviated as 'SADR' or 'SADRv3'; you can click here to see the previous version.

We look at this from the standpoint of a weapon's purpose. You will see many weapons listing their purpose in the SARPwiki, going from light anti-personnel to heavy anti-capital. Here our assumption is that a light anti-starship weapon is meant to shoot down 'light starships'; why else call it that if it cannot do its job? There's also a matter of scale: if you shoot the same weapon at something smaller than a starship, it'll likely be far more ruinous… but it'll likely do much less significant damage on a bigger battleship.

SADRv3 keeps to a 'per-use' perspective on weapons, but that doesn't make all weapons equal: a pistol and a submachinegun may be in the same light anti-personnel tier; both can certainly kill an unprotected human with a well-placed bullet to the heart or chest… but one clearly fires faster and may be a much deadlier weapon.

Keep that in mind while you read down this article. Be it weapons, means of protection, and various vehicles… each SARPwiki article usually has a wealth of information to offer. SADRv3 is meant to give scale and perspective to supplement those. But, it doesn't dictate: that is up the narrative between Game Masters and the Roleplayers in their care.

The table below lists over four columns. The first is numbered, to help picture scaling. The second is the intended nomenclature for the tier; the actual purpose of the weapon (and the term you should see in other SARPwiki articles). The third column includes examples of targets within that tier, for which the 'per-use' result could be potentially lethal. The fourth column are examples of weapons within that tier. The items mentioned are mostly from the Star Army of Yamatai to provide a stable benchmark.

You will also notice that there are divisions by categories: Personnel, Power Armor, Mecha²⁾, and Starships. These are for ease of reference and scale, but are not exclusive. For example: an infantryman can carry an Anti-Mecha bazooka to take down tanks, and fightercrafts can load up anti-starship torpedoes in the hopes of taking down bigger prey. It's also fairly common for larger starships to carry a complement of weapons to deal with smaller targets such as fightercraft.

Tier 0

Unofficial, Tier 0's encompasses the unprotected human and means of harm such as bare fists, clubs and knives.
As this scope is relatable to us in real life, that's left up to common sense between roleplayers and referee.

So, how does that work? What can your gun kill? How much abuse can your shuttle take? We are about to get into that. First comes how the vertical relationships of the tiers listed above.

As alluded to before, using a weapon in the same tier as its target means this weapon is capable of putting it out of combat in a single well-placed attack. It is potentially lethal.

A weapon can cause damage up to four steps above its tier. Each step above reduces the damage it can cause since the target is bigger, heavier, or in general better protected… so we'll label those steps as: heavy damage, moderate damage, light damage, and negligible.

We also rate overkill in four steps, as can be significant to our narrative: quite lethal, very lethal, assuredly lethal, total annihilation.³⁾

So, to put that visually, it's going to look like this table:

What you need to take from this is that you cause less damage to harder targets than your weapon was intended to take down, and more damage to targets softer than that. If the gap becomes too wide in disfavor of the weapon, it won't do much of anything; but too wide in favor of the weapon means lots of overkill.

Nothing in this article needs to be learned by heart. As long as the concept is grasped and that you can figure out “my nekovalkyrja service pistol will only do light damage to a Mindy armor”, you've gleaned what most readers need to from the Damage Rating system. Based on the purpose seen on the weapon article, you're armed with the knowledge of what to expect from your tools. From there, the Game Master should be able to determine the result within the story narrative.

Below are outcomes for different targets for inspiration, along with a few tips. These aren't absolutes, as in the chaos of combat there can be plenty of mitigating factors. For instance, even though a Nekovalkyrja Service Pistol set on 'heavy' can cause a grenade-like blast, something very lethal to a soldier only in uniform, the Game Master would entirely be in the right to judge that if the person dives down in time, perhaps she'd emerge only singed/dazed from the experience.

Practically everything can give a bad day to a light personnel target. If someone packing serious heat is motivated in taking down, say, a policeman in riot armor, the following might happen depending on how badly the poor policeman is outgunned:

Since most modern handguns are qualified as light anti-personnel weapons, they are made to defeat protection like the above policeman's riot armor. That is why policemen usually have ballistic vests in high risk situations - that kind of protection (Tier 2) would prove lifesaving and would result in heavy damage (cracked ribs/severe bruising) instead.

More on that in the next section.

This covers protection confered by padding and plating directly over flesh, such as the full-body hardsuits of Nepleslian Senator Laj Vinross Yu's elite cadre of femme fatale, the 'Uniques'.

Weapons striking below the tier of the target's protection aren't ineffective: the armor is just doing its job of protecting the wearer's life against harm. Also of note is that damage implies some level of deterioration on level of the armor. Even though a body-armored 'Unique' could survive being hosed all over by a light anti-infantry submachinegun, her armor would deteriorate and covered in pockmarks. Continued attacks could keep chewing away at the protection until it becomes compromised.

Bear in mind that an Unique being shot a few times over her hardsuit's right shoulder may mean that this area is more vulnerable, but the her chestplate and left shoulder would still be pristine

Such deterioration is for the Game Master to describe and take into account. Also bear in mind that even though the damage caused might not to lethal, injuries come with their own hazards such as bleeding. That too is under the GM's purview.

Power Armors in the tier table is the first point where we can fully go four steps above and four steps below in lethality.

Unlike body armor which is directly set over flesh, power armors operate on a more robust foundation: a pressure-proof lining to environmentally protect the wearer, along with an endoskeleton that serves as armature for motor actuators or artificial muscle-fibers, then covered an flexible outer covering, and plating over the less articulated regions.

The M6 Daisy Power Armor is one such unit.

Since a power armor is motorized and possesses components to help it operate far beyond the norm of human prowess, sustaining damage can hinder or take out these components (onboard computer, power supply, propulsion system…) are reduce the unit's performance.

State-of-the art power armor commonly include life support functions that can save its wearer from injury. A wearer may be able to ride out injuries thanks to injected painkillers, bleeding up to having a limb severe can be sealed, someone in cardiac arrest may be reanimated

Once the mecha category is reached, the units are no longer conformal to a humanoid's body. At this point, users can go from shuttle pilot to tank driver. Their vehicle may sustain damage, but the injury or death of the crew is collateral damage more than anything else (unless a section like the cockpit is aimed for).

It's much the same for starships, just on a greater scale. Let's cover how a Plumeria medium gunship might cope against harm.

Like power armor, larger vehicles deteriorate from successive damage over the same locations.

Potentially lethal damage is essentially attacks that get past the hull. Just like how a knife can cause damage to different organs in the human body, some of them a human cannot go without, it's the same for vehicles. Such an attack striking the Plumeria's lounge or shuttlebay will impair some functions of the ship, but are unlikely to slow it down in combat. However, strikes to its weapons, engines and shield systems will prove far more telling. Taking out the power supply in engineering will be crippling, forcing the ship to run on backup power. A hit on the bridge could be ruinous to retaining control of the ship. Striking directly at the the armory or the anti-matter storage could result in catastrophic consequences.

Even flesh wounds on a vehicle can come with their share of trouble. On a Plumeria, we could be looking at power surges, severed electrical connections that need to be bypassed, coolant leaks, venting atmosphere, etcetera.

Connecting with an Assuredly Lethal attack, or pouring a lot of successive firepower in a ship's centermass can result in dramatic explosions. But, it's not uncommon for a vehicle to be made inoperable without exploding. In the case of airplanes, striking at engines may not make it explode, but it will rob it of its ability to remain airborne. For spaceships, sufficient damage may make them unable to function or to support life before they'll actually blow up.

Capital vessels are in the upper range of the tiers, the point where weapons in this setting become less likely to cause 'overkill' on them. They account for the mightiest machines in our setting.

While a weapon's designated purpose should give a clear idea as to what you can expect a weapon to be lethal to, that doesn't mean that the weapon will be ineffective when used against a hardier target. The reverse of this is true, the weapon is likely to be much more deadly when used against a softer target than what it is designed to kill.

For the purposes of helping illustrate this point the below chart gives examples of approximate results from the use of weapons from classes above and below a target's class.

With this in mind, it can be clearly understood that a power armor like the Mindy will do its job and protect the wearer from anti-personnel weapons, however this does not guarantee safety from prolonged smallarms fire nor does it make anti-personnel grenades a trivial matter.

In addition weapons of a higher class could very well spell the end of a target despite not hitting it in a critical location. For example an unarmored man struck in the shoulder by an aether saber-rifle could be vaporized by the hit. Another example is that an individual in a power armor that is stuck in the blast radius of an anti-starship torpedo, you can probably count on it being the end for him.

This section provides guidelines to help with the understanding of the nature of defences in the setting giving players and GMs an idea of how different properties act.

At its most basic armor is what gets between an individual and what is trying to kill them. Different materials function in different ways as such it is a good idea to research what materials you are likely to be interacting with so as to best determine how to represent the armor as it is damaged while preforming its job.

It is important to note that changing how much armor a unit has is going to affect which class it belongs in. Adding extra armor to a Daisy for example might move it from Class 5 (Medium PA) to Class 6 (Heavy PA). In addition to this class change it would also affect the function of the unit which should be taken into account IC.

As one would expect placing one's self within a vehicle lends a degree of protection to the user. For example: A power armor may endure weapons fire without breach, while slowly deteriorating/ablating to a point where its breakdown will threaten the wearer should the source of damage continue without being addressed.

It is important to remember that weapons fire that slowly wears away at the armor of a unit is likely under the class value of the machine. Should a weapon be intended to take multiple successive shots to destroy a target it should likely be placed a class or two below the target depending on the amount of successive hits intended.

Shielding is a plot tool that provides GMs with the ability to lend players a certain level of 'recoverable crunchability' when under fire from similar-tier opponents.

“Shield Class” indicates the kind of abuse that the shielding systems are made to withstand at the utmost, while “Shield Charges” indicates how much of damage from that class of weaponry that they can soak up.

As an example, in general most vehicles with good-shielding will be equipped with shields of the same class as the vehicle with an Charge count of 2. For example a Mindy with fully charged shields (Class 6), would be able to endure two hits from a Class 6 weapon before the shields fell and the armor would begin taking damage directly.

This means that for a starship a potentially ship-killing hit will be able to be soaked up by the shielding twice. This guideline is based on the level of lethality displayed by Wes during the Sakura plot and should function as a benchmark when considering shielding systems in the setting.

When a shield receives damage from a source that is above its Class the excess damage the shield cannot handle will bleed through to what the shield was protecting. This means that more weapons of a higher Class can potentially damage or outright destroy a target even when it has full integrity shielding.

To give an example: Shields usually go from full strength to half-strength when something that could kill a player hits him. This provides a function for the player that could be considered equivalent of two extra lives; though with the caveat that the shield doesn't discriminate based on whether a hit that would've been truly lethal (head, chest) as opposed to one that might not have been (limbs).

The process of shield recovery, should usually be reliant on player action while also depending on opportunities provided by both equipment and Game Master.

For example with power armor, a player could duck into cover for a time to allow the shielding system to recharge, or alternatively shields could be restored by shunting capacitor power to the shield generator which could help it recover. It is recommended that full-endurance recovery of shielding systems be used as generally, GMs want players back in the action quickly. This provides a good way of rewarding players for being cautious, depending on teamwork for cover, or making good choices during load-out selection.

For larger vehicles such as starships, shield recovery can instead be portrayed in character as a decision to reinforce one shield facing at the expense of another, or to redistribute power from certain ship systems to compensate for ailing shielding. If available using reserve power can also yield such a benefit. This is a facet of an engagement that is ideally left to player intervention, as there are few ways to do damage control in a fast paced starship battle and shield reinforcement/restoration could be one way to do it.

For the purpose of this damage system lethality is being considered on a per-shot basis. The damage potential for weaponry that has a very high rate of fire is something unique to the weapon and should be detailed and elaborated upon during the submission process.

With this said, if a weapon was made to cause damage to a 'light armor' (Class 4) on multiple hits, it should not be considered a “Light Anti-Armor Weapon”. While the weapon can be described as being used to assault such targets, when it comes to the Class the author should, depending on the intended effectiveness of the weapon, consider whether the weapon will prove lethal on a single hit for a Class 3 or Class 2 target and label it as such.

To give an example, the LASR was designed for use near friendly assets where the potential collateral damage of more powerful weapons was not desired. As such, while it has frequently been employed in an anti-armor role the weapon can be better thought of as an “Anti-Heavy Personnel Weapon” (Class 3) as a single shot to a vital area (head, torso) is likely to incapacitate such a target.

Before, using the previous system it was common that a unit's 'class' level created a certain expectation as to what kind of weapons it could field. Following this revision, these guidelines would be relaxed.

It's entirely possible in the context of modern warfare to have infantry use anti-materiel rifles, or man portable missile systems to be able to shoot and damage/cripple tanks. Following this real world example, it suggests that today's infantry might very well be wielding (Class 6) “Heavy Anti-Armor” weaponry.

The same could be said within our roleplay, where we expect the KFY-produced Aether Saber-Rifle to be able to cut holes through a ship's hull; this may solidly situate them in the (Class 7) “Light Anti-Mecha” category - in turn making them dangerous even to the larger Mishhuvurthyar mecha.

This same attitude can be applied toward for limited-use weaponry such as grenades. A person can carry a number of anti-personnel grenades and potentially use them to achieve a far larger level of lethality than most other anti-personnel weapons offer.

Missiles/torpedoes on fightercraft should usually see the same notion, making bombing runs on larger vessels a realistic threat.

The reverse is also true.

Let's take the Plumeria-class gunship for example.

It is built around a singular weapon: its aether shock array. Since the title “pocket battleship” is used in reference to this warship, it would be credible to believe it was actually be an asset that can potentially sink heavy cruisers and battleships. For the purpose of this example, it will be represented as a (Class 13) “Light Anti-Capital” weapon.

The two railguns on its wings serve the warship more as its dogfighting weapons to use against other ships around its size class. Intended to be used as one weaves around to get a good firing solution, fire and expect it to hurt or die. This kind of slates those as (Class 11) “Medium Anti-Starship” weapons.

The turreted anti-ship cannons can be employed against other vessels, but as these are turreted weapons with good range of fire, it would be a good balancing act to not make them as potent as the one-hit KO we expect from the fixed forward-facing pylon railgun. Making them appropriate to gut shuttles, this still makes them a credible menace to starships, so having them be (Class 9) “Heavy Anti-Mecha” weaponry seems most appropriate.

The smaller anti-armor weapons were meant as a direct counter to Mishhu battlepods, as well as being able to preform some extra duty to shoot down power armor and incoming missiles. Unless it is in the best condition possible, most power armor should not expect to survive a direct hit from such a piece of equipment, so these are labelled (Class 7) “Light Anti-Mecha” weaponry.

The two torpedoes the Plumeria can carry are weapons are meant to directly supplement the ship-killing firepower it can bring to bear with its traditionally slow-charging railguns. The Z-1 torpedo, given an anti-matter payload, would possibly do as much as the positron railguns themselves, so they could be labeled as (Class 11) “Medium Anti-Starship” warheads. Their value would lie as breaking the fire rate/lethality limit/charge time the Plumeria has to make it especially good at what it is: an interceptor that swiftly brings down nimble warships or can perform devastatingly (for its size) brief hit-and-run strike on a heavier target without having the extra mass of a full torpedo loadout.