Scale

The fictional stuff to address:

In this setting, there's more organization of people and resources, big machines, big groups, big armies and ships. What happens when the characters face the equivalent of a star destroyer in their little putzy ship?


The easiest place to start, probably, is creating a quick size chart and saying one step up from you is a small gang, two steps up is a large gang, and three or more is effectively untouchable. You can't invade a world with a small gang.

To borrow from the army really quick, the scale might be kind of like this:

Soldier
Squad
Platoon
Battalion
Regiment
Division
etc

But maybe not quite so many, I dunno. But the idea, is, say, that a tank all by itself probably counts as a squad, with good harm and armor. A squad with anti-tank weapons could probably take out a single tank, yeah? A bunch of tanks would count as a platoon, maybe, and then it gets scary for the squad.

So a regiment fighting a battalion would be like a person fighting a small gang. A squad fighting a regiment would be like the squad dying in a bloodbath.

Like you said, that list might feel a bit too fine-grained, at least to my uninitiated eyes. Maybe something like:
soldier/personal vehicle
squad/small vehicle
platoon/large vehicle
regiment/small base
army/large base
...to not get too technical?

I mentioned Vincent's Stat Strata in the stat thread. Do you think something like that? A missile launcher might then in itself be a personal stratum weapon, because it doesn't need a squad to operate, with missiles doing squad or even platoon stratum damage, depending on target and missile type?

Simon, yeah, the strata thing came up in an offline discussion, but I'll see how the "gang" thing works first.

I don't think there's anything problematic, at first glance, with a granular size chart. Mouse Guard has 8-9 different sizes and works just fine.

Cool. A matter of taste, I suppose. :)

looking forward to reading more, as I said earlier!