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"On basic enviromental protections:
Some armors do this through an environmental field (a minor force field specially tuned to protect from a vacuum that doesn’t reduce damage from attacks), while others can be closed with helmets and airtight seals. While using your armor’s environmental protections, your armor can protect you from the dangerous environmental effects of a vacuum and can facilitate self-contained breathing. This allows you to survive and breathe while within a vacuum or a submerged area of non-damaging liquid. This protection doesn’t protect you from smoke inhalation, inhaled poisons, thick or thin atmospheres, toxic atmospheres, or corrosive atmospheres."
Thin atmospheres... you know what a vacuum is.. airtight.. if a O2 molecule can't slip through then how is a complete chemical poison compound. Self contained breathing... you mean like fire fighters wear to not die from smoke inhalation.
Corrosive is the only one that makes sense at least for a physical protection as it would attack said airtight seals.
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TTRPG game rules are not a reality simulator.
Also, we are talking about a universe where magic and magitech are both readily available. Surely there is room in the narrative for a portable form of environmental protections are able to get the job done without being a space suit from Earth's 1970s or modern (and cumbersome) SCBA gear. And that such portable, ubiquitously available magitech-based environmental protections are only capable of the basic life support listed in the rules.
TTRPG game rules are not a reality simulator.
Also, we are talking about a universe where magic and magitech are both readily available. Surely there is room in the narrative for a portable form of environmental protections are able to get the job done without being a space suit from Earth's 1970s or modern (and cumbersome) SCBA gear. And that such portable, ubiquitously available magitech-based environmental protections are only capable of the basic life support listed in the rules.
A vacuum is a thin atmosphere. By default for something to protect you against a vacuum it has to function in any atmospheric density from standard to partial and even full vacuum doesn't matter how it is achieved the most simple physics dictate it and Starfinder is more technology based then magic.
I assumed that is why Injector weapons are a thing to be honest...
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I can justify this.
The devices used to provide that breathable air and seal in a vacuum are take up resources. So, by standard programming, they only activate when they detect vacuum. Any other time, they are just passive systems, building up resources until they're needed.
This way the corpos selling the armor and the upgrades and mods can charge you for the additional environmental protections.
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"On basic enviromental protections:
Some armors do this through an environmental field (a minor force field specially tuned to protect from a vacuum that doesn’t reduce damage from attacks), while others can be closed with helmets and airtight seals. While using your armor’s environmental protections, your armor can protect you from the dangerous environmental effects of a vacuum and can facilitate self-contained breathing. This allows you to survive and breathe while within a vacuum or a submerged area of non-damaging liquid. This protection doesn’t protect you from smoke inhalation, inhaled poisons, thick or thin atmospheres, toxic atmospheres, or corrosive atmospheres."Thin atmospheres... you know what a vacuum is.. airtight.. if a O2 molecule can't slip through then how is a complete chemical poison compound. Self contained breathing... you mean like fire fighters wear to not die from smoke inhalation.
Corrosive is the only one that makes sense at least for a physical protection as it would attack said airtight seals.
One of the most disappointing features of SF1 for me was how difficult the default environmental protections made it to make "struggle against the environment" adventures. Especially since this is a common trope in sci-fi.
So you can add me to the list of people hoping to see the default environmental protections minimized/cut down. I'd much prefer these show up as (1) additional equipment that has an opportunity cost, and so isn't ubiquitous, and (2) things that are relatively specialized (perhaps one upgrade protects from extreme heat, a different one protects from extreme cold, a third protects against extreme pressure, etc). This would make adventures with "struggle against the environment" features much more do-able.
EDIT: And to the extent to which default environmental protections are kept, I hope they shorten the duration. E.g., if armor comes with (lvl minutes) of environmental protections, then it's something you generally keep off and only turn on during emergencies. But if all armor comes with multiple hours or days of environmental protections, then it's effectively removed as a plot point for GMs.
It didn't hurt my head because I thought "that's really stupid" and instantly decided to house rule that, when active, environmental protections do protect against those things. Some things, the corrosive atmosphere for example, could damage your armor but as long as it's still functioning they wouldn't damage you.
Also note "A suit of armor’s environmental protections last for a number of days equal to its item level."
So since all Commercial grade armor has an item level of 0 that means armor only has environmental protections once you upgrade it to Tactical grade. I don't think they intended it to be that way because the rules also state:
"All non-archaic armors, except those with the exposed trait, allow you to breathe and survive in a vacuum or in non-hazardous underwater environments."
I think the best fix would be to change it to "A suit of armor’s environmental protections last for a number of days equal to its item level. Treat 0 level armor as level 1 for this rule."
Or if you want a campain where "struggle against the environment" is a thing, just leave it that only the better grades of armor have protections.
Depending on your situation you won't be able to eat or drink in your armor without removing it. So you'd die of hunger and/or thirst before your day limit is up past a certain point.
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Playability considerations over strict scientific accuracy, basically.
Similar to how radiation is treated in-game, instead of a "realistic" modeling of it.
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A simple solution if the PCs really need higher-level thermal capacitors for a mission an NPC can just loan them to the party for that mission. That's no different than the Starfinder Socity loaning the PCs a ship when needed.
NASA Astronauts didn't have to buy their space suits, they are assigned to them by the Mission Control Center.
I don't see why for a playability reason we want it to be easy to deal with vacuum but not low density atmosphere or toxic gaz. Except if you are of the Aspis Consortium and want to make adventurers pay for the "low-atmosphere licence", the "poisonous licence", etc. And then every adventurers would hack their armor licences...
I can see one. Something like a poisonous atmosphere is something that can be reasonably escaped, scaled in severity to match party level, endured for some time even without preparation, especially if there are settlements or outposts to take you in to rest, and are overall a hazard to contend with which can make for interesting gameplay.
The icy vacuum of space meanwhile is a very extreme binary on/off switch, which when pushed triggers a TPK (without environmental protections to offset it). It would be hard to justify scaling it in any way because there's only one thing to speak of, the vacuum. If its danger level is set to any one thing it would either be entirely unsurvivable by low level characters or a joke for high level characters, quite possibly both. I personally see this as very undesirable, combating the natural properties of space is a struggle that should be compelling at all levels, even if the scale of what that means is different.
I'm in favor of majorly nerfing or even reworking environmental protections but regardless I want it to stay exclusive to vacuums. The actual reason that system is there is so that you can interact with the hazard of Space(TM) on a PC level, which is a valuable thing to keep. Other hazards simply don't need this kind of consideration to work.
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The problem with environmental protections is they needs to work differently for different types of adventures. In some cases, it enables the adventure to happen at all, on the flip side it messes with or in some cases prevents the use of trap like hazards or survival adventures. All of those should be options at any level.
I don't know how to balance all of that out, but at least if environmental protection is an armor upgrade and or available separate from armor, then adding or removing it won't mess with the PCs armor.
Since equipment is tied to level, one solution is to loan the PCs high-level equipment when it's a requirement to play the adventure. The flipside of that is trickier because you need a good reason why the PCs have lost, left behind, or have had their environmental protection disabled.
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There's limits to how far you can push the gameism to break immersion and being fine with walking on the moon but your armor can't help you stand on top of mount everest doesn't just break that it nukes it.
There's limits to how far you can push the gameism to break immersion and being fine with walking on the moon but your armor can't help you stand on top of mount everest doesn't just break that it nukes it.I just now started looking into Starfinder since it is technically PF2 compatible.
And basically the first thing I end up seeing in the rule-book is that a character is in a fine-unless-they-aren't situation when it comes to being outside of typical breathable atmospheric conditions.
Need to do repairs outside your starship? The basic protections imply you are fine by saying you're protected from vacuum. Yet if you're standing in vacuum and totally not having your air supply sucked out into said vacuum and someone tosses a gas grenade at you the environment outside your suit is no longer fully separate from the environment inside your suit.
Then add the thermal capacitor upgrade to the mix and either we land on player expectation and genre shattered together as "I'll go out and repair the ship" turns lethal because the vacuum of space has an extreme temperature the character isn't actually protected from. Or else it tells us that actually, in this space fantasy setting, space is normally a comfortably moderate temperature so you don't need protection from temperature just to be able to exist safely in it.
Which is to say this is a weird thing to need to house-rule in an "space adventure" kind of game. Not a hard house-rule to figure out, just awkward to have to.
Apologies in advance for the long-winded reply, but space being "cold" isn't actually a big deal, and it should at worst be "severe cold" for minor cold damage once per hour- with the VERY important note that this is only as long as you have a suit of some kind keeping everything from boiling off.
Here on earth, we're used to being surrounded by air (citation needed). When the air around us is much colder than us, heat transfers from us to the air to even things out through a mixture of conduction (warming the air around us), convection (colder air replacing the warmed air), and just a little bit of radiation that we can write off as unimportant for anything but thermal cameras.
In space, there are certainly some stray particles, but not really anything we need to concern ourselves with. Space is mostly nothing, and it's a little impractical to talk about the temperature of nothing (given how temperature is generally defined)- so when space is given a temperature, it's generally the energy of cosmic background radiation, since unheated objects left in space eventually cool down to that after hundreds of years.
If you put somebody sealed (or whatever approximation of sealed Starfinder space suits are) out into that vacuum, their heat doesn't have any way to transfer except by radiating off as infrared light. There's nothing to conduct it to and no convection occurring. There's a reason that vacuum-sealed thermoses offer excellent thermal insulation, after all. (Lying down on an airless asteroid that has had ages to cool down to the background radiation temperature? Terrible idea- no more thermos protection. That's probably outside of what the rules aim to handle, though.)
Using a few online calculators, if we take a liter of water at boiling temperature, stick it in a bubble that it can't get out of, and stick it in space, it'll take about three times as long to hit freezing temperature than if we stuck it in a regular freezer with the temperature of a cold Siberian day (-40 C, instead of space's nominal -270 C). That makes space [i]less[i] of a cold problem than the "extreme cold" category, severe at worst.
I'm hoping that the GM Core includes a little tidbit on why the cold of space isn't something that characters need to worry about in the short-term, even with just basic environmental protections. If not, I'm not too worried.
For the rest, I'm good with a hand-wavey "particles can go in easier than out", since the devs said that SF1's environmental protections posed actual problems for scenario writing. Trying to use gas weapons in open vacuum should just result in immediate dispersal of the gas anyway, so I'm never expecting to run into the bizarre situation of "protecting against the vacuum while at the same time not the gas".
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I remain in the "disgruntled about the 2e Environmental Protections nerf" camp. Especially because many of us pointed this out as a potential massive problem in the Playtest. It doesn't make sense in-universe (outside of convoluted "Megacorps said so" rationalizations) and I struggle to understand the nerf outside of universe, either. I am left to conclude that this is another sacrifice on the altar of "to make the game more compatible with PF2's meta-states?" but even that doesn't feel satisfactory.
It's basic starfaring exploration gear, and enabled the kinds of stories that Starfinder is meant to tell: exploring arctic moons, the chromosphere of a star, a super-chilled server farm, or who knows what else! If a Pathfinder character got access to it - they should be able to laugh their way through environmental challenges!
And to those who say "oh 1e Environmental Protections were too powerful, they obviated too many classic environmental hazards" - if that's your attitude, why are you even playing Starfinder? If you want to worry about a room flooding with water, or smoke, or poison gas, go play Pathfinder. Not mention - you can still have meaningful environmental hazards in Starfinder! You just have to come up with a rationale that makes sense. And - it's Starfinder! That's not even hard! Breathing in poison gas can just as easily be breathing in protections-shattering nanites. Room filling with water just as easily becomes room filling with acid. If an atmosphere-impermeable shell stymied all of your environmental threats, then it's time to sit down and dream up different environmental hazards!
Bah. Environmental Protections didn't deserve this.
(And don't even get me started on
Seizing on one of the smallest points here:
A suit of armor’s environmental protections last for a number of days equal to its item level (minimum 1 day).
Which solves the level 0 armor issue at least (though as others pointed out, 1 day seems a long time).
I remain in the "disgruntled about the 2e Environmental Protections nerf" camp. Especially because many of us pointed this out as a potential massive problem in the Playtest. It doesn't make sense in-universe (outside of convoluted "Megacorps said so" rationalizations) and I struggle to understand the nerf outside of universe, either. I am left to conclude that this is another sacrifice on the altar of "to make the game more compatible with PF2's meta-states?" but even that doesn't feel satisfactory.
It's basic starfaring exploration gear, and enabled the kinds of stories that Starfinder is meant to tell: exploring arctic moons, the chromosphere of a star, a super-chilled server farm, or who knows what else! If a Pathfinder character got access to it - they should be able to laugh their way through environmental challenges!
And to those who say "oh 1e Environmental Protections were too powerful, they obviated too many classic environmental hazards" - if that's your attitude, why are you even playing Starfinder? If you want to worry about a room flooding with water, or smoke, or poison gas, go play Pathfinder. Not mention - you can still have meaningful environmental hazards in Starfinder! You just have to come up with a rationale that makes sense. And - it's Starfinder! That's not even hard! Breathing in poison gas can just as easily be breathing in protections-shattering nanites. Room filling with water just as easily becomes room filling with acid. If an atmosphere-impermeable shell stymied all of your environmental threats, then it's time to sit down and dream up different environmental hazards!
Bah. Environmental Protections didn't deserve this.
(And don't even get me started on ** spoiler omitted **...
I too would like to hope that in the future we didn't just overcomplicate technology to get the same effect. That we aren't still living in the medieval era of environmental protections, but now it is flashy.
Likewise in our over the top scifi fantasy I hope I am not dealing with the old school poison gas again. There is a reason this is science fiction. Use that, play to the setting.If you want a space walk to be dangerous, add a threat. Sudden meteor shower, an eldritch entity from the space between stars which has clung to the ship. If you want a survivalist game make the environments stupid extreme. Your survival campaign is on the sun with technology pushed beyond the warranty so that its listed duration cannot be relied on.
Also as someone else said it doesn't seem like you should be able to eat in a lethal environment. So at its most basic level, they will eventually starve to death if they get lost and don't take the terrain seriously. Use that.