I recently purchased Ascendant and I have greatly enjoyed going over it the last few days. Very nice piece of work; I know these things take a lot of effort to get out and everyone involved should feel very proud of themselves.
While flipping back and forth trying to get a proper grasp on Damage Types, I noticed the example taser (p. 237) is listed as a “Nonlethal Ionizing Blast 4”. Now from my understanding, Ionizing is supposed to be used for radiation damage, like microwaves or the like; tasers I thought used electricity and I had assumed Electrical or possibly Neural Damage Type. So, am I not understanding how tasers work, or am I not understanding how the damage types work?
Could just be a typo. Mechanically, the only problem would be if a target had Ionising Resistance but not Electrical Resistance, but both Ionising and Electrical have the same Special Effect so except for this very specific scenario you won’t notice any difference in actual play.
In the 1990s Star Wars D6 RPG, ion cannons and ion blasters function somewhat like tasers by stunning you rather than killing you.
I think my 12-year-old self subconsciously settled on the notion that “ionizing” means “stun” so that 33 years later I would erroneously assign the Ionizing damaging type to tasers in Ascendant.