Recharging Armor Environment Protection With Transfer Charge

[KornMuffin]

Can a Technomancer use Transfer Charge to recharge an armor's environmental protections from spare batteries?

The rules say ...
"Most of the recharging stations that replenish devices, such as batteries and power cells (see page 234), also recharge armor’s environmental protections, and using them to recharge suits is typically free of price."

[Xenocrat]

No. The environmental recharge is a separate function that is often colocated with battery recharging stations, but it isn't providing the same thing.

[KornMuffin]

Xenocrat wrote:

No. The environmental recharge is a separate function that is often colocated with battery recharging stations, but it isn't providing the same thing.

Gotcha.

The Transfer Charge spell description contains the following:

Quote:

You can only transfer charges using two objects of the exact

same type (two batteries of the same size, two identical power
cells, or the like); you transfer charges from the source object
to the receiving object.

Could you then transfer the charge between armors? Say you have an unused lvl 1 armor. Could you use it to add a day's worth of environmental protections to say a lvl 3 armor?

[Xenocrat]

GM call - "power cells" are an undefined and possibly legacy term for internal batteries that may (or may not) have been intended to be cut from the final product. If that's so, they don't provide any support for trying to extend this past batteries.

[The Ragi]

I think the spell was written specifically with electric sources in mind.

If you transfer more charges from
the source than the receiving item can hold, the receiving item
must succeed at a Fortitude saving throw or take 1d6 electricity
damage.

[KornMuffin]

The Ragi wrote:

I think the spell was written specifically with electric sources in mind.

If you transfer more charges from
the source than the receiving item can hold, the receiving item
must succeed at a Fortitude saving throw or take 1d6 electricity
damage.

Good point. I assumed (and maybe incorrectly) that all of the armor's functions were powered by batteries/power cells.

The armor Environmental Protections section has the following:

Quote:

Some armors do this through an environmental field (a minor force field specially attuned to pressure and temperature

that does not reduce damage from attacks), while others can be closed with helmets and airtight seals.

I am leaning towards GM discretion with this. I'll leave it up to them if they want the environmental aspect to really be something that we need to consider/overcome or not.

[Dracomicron]

I kinda think that you should be able to transfer environmental protection hours between armors the way SCUBA divers or astronauts trade air in tanks in TV & movies. Require an Engineering check for sure, but no special magic.

Could lead to some nice drama as PCs give away some of their last remaining life support to save the essential NPC.

[WatersLethe]

I rationalized it not working by assuming environmental protections is a combination of electrical charge, consumables like filters and oxygen, and accumulated damage perhaps from things like radiation. A charging station has spare filters and oxygen blocks and scrubbers.

That was my take anyway, and makes it at least possible that average adventurers have to interact with the environmental protection limit at some point rather than it being solved by carrying cheap batteries and a cantrip.

[Pantshandshake]

Everyone should just get a Black Heart necrograft and call it a day.

[HammerJack]

If you're talking about the kind of long term operation where it matters, a black heart lets you stretch things further, but it doesn't remove the question.

[Pantshandshake]

Depends how 'long term' you want to get.

Level 5 armor and a Mk2 black heart will get you somewhere around a month of environmental protection. Hopefully you're getting back to a ship or a major settlement at some point in there, then you can just proceed to narrate how your armor's environmental protections have been refreshed, with or without the exchange of money, goods, or services.

[Xenocrat]

985 credits buys you two aeon stones that eliminate the need to breath, eat, or drink in perpetuity. Manage your exposure to heat/cold/radiation and you're fine.

[HammerJack]

How are you getting a month out of that? I count 14 days.

[Pantshandshake]

HammerJack wrote:

How are you getting a month out of that? I count 14 days.

Black Heart gives you environmental protection for 2 days x item level. Mark 2 is level 6. So there’s 12. It also regenerates when you’re not using it (at 1 hour recharges for each hour you’re not using it.)

Armor is a day per item level.

So 5 days of black heart, followed by 5 days of armor, followed by 12 days of black heart, assuming you can’t get into an ok environment at any point in that time, gives you 22 days (a little shy of a month, my math was off, apologies.)

So even if, in your game, tracking and dealing with recharging/refreshing/adding a cost to environmental protection is something you want to do, it's trivially easy to relegate it to basically auto-paying your internet bill.

[HammerJack]

I see what I did. I thought it was 2 days per mk, not per item level.

Either way, just because it's a niche question that won't be an issue in most campaigns doesn't mean it isn't worth answering.

[Pantshandshake]

HammerJack wrote:

I see what I did. I thought it was 2 days per mk, not per item level.

Either way, just because it's a niche question that won't be an issue in most campaigns doesn't mean it isn't worth answering.

No worries, I only had a good idea of what the black heart did because I recently upgraded to a Mk2 last time I played.

It's totally worth answering, and in the grand scheme of Starfinder questions, it's a pretty legitimate question. It also was answered, immediately, by Xenocrat. As was a follow up question. The rest of this thread has been discussing the various ways people like to add complexity to the environmental protection properties of armor.

So, I went the other way. Have a GM that feels the need to inject a robust amount of book-keeping rules into the way your character breathes? Here's how you tell your GM "Nope, I still don't need to put more thought into it than 'on or off.'

[Dracomicron]

One of the APs has a long trek for which armor protections are necessary to avoid taking small amounts of damage every hour, but only while traveling (off-hours required no protection).

Two of us had Black Hearts, and I was a 4th level Witchwarper with Life Bubble for the other four. It erased literally all of the paperwork from that section.