Quote:
Originally Posted by khorboth
I, admittedly, haven't read the other threads. I've only done a little space combat, but I have a couple of ideas.
1) There was a scene in The Expanse before a battle where they all got into vac suits and drained all the air from the ship.
2) Give a HT check to the ship to avoid catastrophic explosions.
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1) is actually of debatable value. Without air to slow it down shrapnel from impact sites flies at over a thousand feet per second and doesn't slow down. You'd need to have crew in space armor from UT at a minimum jsut to withstand those sorts of fragments but the space armor sees lower levels of threats if there's still atmosphere. Atmosphere also severely limits plasmas. Atmosphere's chief function besides breathing though is heat re-distibution. With no air al the equipennt inside needs hard-plumbed cooling systems in the walls and the crew need to be hooked into those too. The threat of atmosphere providing a way for concussive blast waves to travel can be dealt with more easily by pressure relief valves. Put your crews in armored space suits sure but don't bother draining off the atmosphere.
2) Just like it isn't vacuum that kills crews it's not exploding engines or whatever either. In Spaceships what kills ships is running all the way through their HP. PCs already get rolls to survive this too.
You can't add "compartmentalization" either because Spaceships is already built around this as a central principle. That's what the 20 hit locations are. Each is a separate compartment in the ship. you transfer damage from the intial hit location because there's enough damage to destroy that compartment and blow through the bulkheads.