These seemed to be the two biggest holes in the conflicts table to me. Martial Arts is a split from Physical Combat, and Information Warfare is something that seems to happen frequently without any clear rules. Martial arts I'm pretty sure will work since it's just a reshuffle of combat plus athletics. Infowar I'm less confident about, since the scale might be a bit broad. Feedback appreciated!
Martial Arts
Martial arts conflict is any physical hand-to-hand combat, including boxing, wrestling, fencing, or true martial arts. Possibly small unpowered weapons are involved, but any high-tech melee weapon should be handled under Physical Combat. A martial arts conflict could be serious combat or a sparring march, possibly judged.
Offense: Biotech & Soldier, Police, or (Athletics)
Defense: Nanotech & Soldier, Police, or (Athletics)
Escape: Biotech + (Stealth) or Athletics
Timescale: 10 seconds
- +1 Combat enhancement
- +1 Second attacker
- +2 Slow target
- -1 Environment penalty
- -1 Attempt to disarm, trip, or hold
- -1 Small target (mouse or insect size)*
- -2 Distracted
*attack vs nano-size target impossible
Victory: Unconsciousness, broken bones, death
Notes: I think that Physical Combat really doesn't work well for representing one-on-one hand combat. The capabilities are off, and the modifiers for size don't make much sense (nanobots are unlikely to be hurt by impact, and even at Bio 10 punching a starship seems fruitless). OTOH, attacking someone with very high stringtech by punching them might not work regardless of their defense stats, and the GM might rule that the attacker can't do any damage.
In this scheme, biotech represents physical power in attack, and nanotech speed and reflexes for defense. I think the athletics skill addition also works well for this combat, since now and likely in the future these activities are both sport and personal defense.
Information Warfare
The invasion, subversion, and possibly destruction of computer systems is a major threat in the high tech, ubiquitously networked world. This conflict can scale from small attacks against a single network to assaults on an entire planet's infosphere. The results of information war depend on the attacker's intentions; he may be seeking specific data to capture or destroy, attempting to force privileged access to computers, or simply cause viral chaos.
Escape from infowar means either turning off computers or severing network connections. For small systems this has an auto success as long as the first round of attack does not result in instant victory. For larger networks this means convincing people in charge of the networks to do so despite
Although the conflict resolution works out in a short time period, the preparation work for infowarfare is often much longer, thus represented by the resources modifiers. In no way can this replace mesh-hacking to attack an individual, and neither can it be used against a Stored's "body" computer (non-simulation computers owned by Stored are fair game).
Offense: Cognitech + (Programmer or Spy)
Defense: Cognitech + (Programmer, Media, or Cognitech Engineer)
Escape: Auto or Metatech + Politics, Media, or (Locality)
Timescale: Minutes to Hours
- +1 Greater monetary or technology resources*
- +1 Access to familiars or combat dataforms
- -1 per level of time delay
- -1 Inferior monetary or technology resources*
- -2 Vastly inferior resources**
*Double if both apply.
** Additional penalty to the above. A single person attacking the whole infosphere network of a planet might have up to -4 penalty. Tough.
Victories: Data captured or destroyed, computers subverted, infosphere damaged or taken off-line
Notes: War or combat in the infosphere is an obvious lack. The SA universe isn't at all cyberpunk, but it seems to me that the "too much to loose" nature of most of the civilizations means info-war is more likely to happen than actual killing war. And indeed, almost every time I've played, GMed, or watched SA played, someone hacked some computers.
