Advanced Rules: Hacking

This page is for advanced rules related to the Hacking stat.

Types

There are five types of hacks:

Description Difficulty
Corruption You plant a virus into the target that causes a particular ship system to degrade by one point. +0
Bug You plant a virus into the target that sends information on a particular ship system back to you. +0
Disable You plant a virus into the target that causes a particular ship system to stop working entirely. +1
Control You hack into a particular system on the target and are from then on able to directly control it. +2
Destroy You are able to damage a particular system on the target to where it no longer works, permanently. +3

Additionally, every time anyone makes an attempt to hack a particular person/machine, hacking that particular person/machine has +1 extra difficulty to hack from then on, stackable. Once every two turns, this value will decay by 1. For example: if you stack the value up to 5, it will take 10 turns to fully decay.

To find the effectiveness of a hack, you roll the attacker's (Hacking Systems) against the defender's (Computer), with the difficulty subtracted from your roll.

When a target is successfully hacked, every turn there is a new roll to determine whether the hack persists or gets flushed out by the target's firewall. Per turn 1 difficulty is added to the hack.
So say e.g. a hacker with hacking 2 hacks a target with a computer of 0, and the hack is a simple bug with difficulty 0.
The initial roll thus has a +2 modifier.
If the hack succeeds, the turn after there's again a roll to determine whether the hack persists. This time the roll has a modifier of +2-1=+1. If it fails, the hack disappears. If it succeeds, the hack stays.
The turn after there's again a roll, where the modifier becomes 0, etc.

Methods

There are several methods of hacking available to you. Some of them can only be accomplished from within a CASKET, while others can only be accomplished on foot.

Usage Max ship range Max PDA range
Radio/WiFi Ship hack 1 km
PDA Infantry hack 500 m 10 m
Hypersonic +2 to next hack on same target; +2 chance to succeed 100 m 1 m
Infrared Used to confuse ship sensors 2 km