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In Player's Guide on p. 106 there's a note that: "Radiation damage is treated like regular wounds (p.103), although a radiated character must make an Endurance+Vigor goal roll each or suffer from radiation sickness that day". There's also information about time required to heal radiation (much slower than normal healing up to TL6).
An then, on p.332 there's a description of Radium Blaster: "Radium Blasters inflict radiation poisoning (p.105) equal to the ordinary injury caused to the target, in addition to to the ordinary blaster damage."

It's not clear to me what that means - is radiation noted on separate track Vitality-like track or is it noted directly on Vitality track? I lean towards option 1 (separate track), because otherwise Radium Blaster's "in addition to the ordinary damage" would be an excess (effectively double damage). But on the other hand on p.106 I can read: "If a character loses Critical Vitality levels due to radiation poisoning, he has suffered some sort of permanent, and likely irreversible, radiation effect", which may suggest that radiation affects Vitality directly.

I see a contradiction here, isn't radiation damage a normal (but harder to heal) damage and if so, shouldn't radium blaster wounds be treated as radiation wounds (instead of causing radiation damage in addition to blaster damage)?
Or maybe radiation damage is treated (and healed) separately (and radium blaster causes damage in both "normal" and radiation vitality)?

Hi Tupteq,
In most cases, radiation should be listed separately from injuries. This applies to situations where a character suffers radiation from non-combat situations (in which case radiation sickness doesn't directly affect vitality). However, with some radiation type weapons things get a bit more complicated. In those instances, vitality lost due to radiation attacks must be tallied as radiation sickness in addition to vitality lost. One does not lose vitality twice from radiation, but rad attack damage cause a special kind of vitality loss. This was all an attempt to merge radiation poisoning rules with the combat rules.

So, if you stand too close to the starship power core, you suffer radiation sickness without vitality loss (you might not even be aware of the radiationat first). If you are attacked by a radiation weapon however, you also suffer vitality loss ontop of the radiation sickness.

Never buy cheap core insulation...

Thanks for reply!

So, if I understand correctly - non-combat radiation is tracked separately from Vitality, but still, you can die from it (gaining radiation level that equals or exceeds your base Vitality) or you can suffer some permanent effect ("If a character loses Critical Vitality levels due to radiation poisoning, he has suffered some sort of permanent, and likely irreversible, radiation effect").

Or maybe this cited text above applies only to combat radiation?

Radiation sickness (or "damage" if one will) is supposed to be a seperate ailment, although some attacks cause both physical injury and radiation sickness. The easiest way to simulate this would be to have two vitality tracks, one for physical injuries and one for radiation sickness - these would overlap in the case of rad.blasters and the like.

Never would have guessed from reading the rules that rad-damage is it's own separate entity from normal damage. I had assumed that it functioned like "Aggravated Damage" from WoD games.

I must admit that I don't remember the rules exactly. I know that at one point I toyed with the idea of using the same vitality track, but marking rad.damage differently (as an "x" rather than filling inn the circle, or whatever).