As the rules currently stand, 10 "character-scale" damage equals to one "vehicle-scale" damage and vice versa. However, there are a lot of weapon qualities that modify the damage a weapon does, including breach, pierce, and vicious. However, the problem with having only two scales, we run into the problem of having speeders be bullet proof to anything that doesn't have the breach quality.
When I look at certain weapons that are meant to do damage to vehicles - missile tubes and thermal detonators, specifically - the combination of damage and breach is enough to kill anyone in pretty much one hit. Even the heavy repeating blaster, which should be able to damage light vehicles, is only useful against character-scale threats due to the damage scaling.
I propose a scaling system that is akin to how WEG did things. In brief, when shooting at higher scale targets, you got a bonus on your attack roll, but they got the same bonus on the soak roll. If shooting at a smaller scale target, they got a bonus on their dodge roll, but you got a bonus on your damage roll. In WEG, for those who aren't familiar with it, the attack roll is divorced from the damage roll, so no bonus damage for higher attack rolls. This had a very nice side benefit of having all damage/toughness numbers in a "standard band." Most damage was between 2D-5D, no matter if it's a blaster pistol or a turbolaser battery.
The 5 main scales were: Character -> Speeder -> Walker -> Starfighter -> Capital
Tramp freighters and such were considered starfighter scale, while heavy combat speeders sometimes were walker scale.
What I propose is this:
- Similar scaling structure
- Keep all weapon damage in the 5-10 range (where most already fall), so we don't get weird outliers like 15 or 20
- Scaling system so bigger weapons hurt more against smaller targets
- Revamp the breach & pierce qualities
For example, When attacking a larget target, you need to "activate" one crit per scale difference to do normal damage, double that do an actual crit. When attacking a smaller target, you do normal damage plus an auto crit, with a +10 per additional scale larger. The breach quality does damage to larger scale targets as if it's one step higher on the scale. So a missile tube does damage to non-character scale targets as if it's a speeder-scale weapon. A proton torpedo does damage to capital ships as if it were a capital-scale weapon. Pierce ignores soak/armour as normal if attacking same or smaller scale target, half as effective against larger scale threats.
Note that the vehicle rules take care of the difficulty of shooting larger/smaller things.
So as an example, a character now has a decent chance to hurt a speeder, especially if using a blaster rifle or disruptor.
Granted, this would require another revamp of the weapons, and an overhaul of the vehicle stat blocks, but I think it's a good idea. Speeders, Y-wings, and Star Destroyers aren't the same scale of vehicle, so I don't think that they should be treated as such under the rules.
-EF