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Recovery question: the rules seem to suggest that a Medical Aid roll for helping someone recover from damage can only be made if the victim is incapacitated. Is that as intended? Seems strange. It is the same for Stress/Command.

An example of why this seems strange. Say I have 5 damage points and am incapacitated in a fight. My Very Good Healer Buddy gets to me and rolls Medical Aid not even as well as he theoretically might have, and I recover 3 damage immediately.

Now, if instead I am reduced to only 1 damage, and am therefore RAW (I think) ineligible to get care, it will take me 2 shifts of rest/sleep to get my health back to where it could have been instantly if I had just been hurt worse!

I'm having trouble seeing the logic there.

I sort of like that there is no "instant healing", Medical Aid is meant for those incapacitated or critical wounded people only. It is a survival game not really heroic journey game. Sure that situation could arise where could heal more then 1 but I think that is ok. It allows the medic to have there "critical success"...just like the those firing rounds down range. Also remember they only get one shot at this...if it fails they cannot retry it until until incapacitated again or they find more advanced medical tech.
It is sort a way to slow healing down, otherwise the medic could just keep providing aid and suddenly you are all better. You could always house rule that but I think it would change the tone of the game personally.

Damage down to incapacitated is meant to represent non-serious combat injuries. Hence it is a combination of blunt trauma, stress, minor cuts and scrapes, and so on. Such injuries are more likely to be tended post-battle and by the injured person.

Criticals is where serious wounds kick in. Those wounds are more likely to receive treatment on the battlefield.

The issue with serious wounds is they have the capacity to remove characters from being able to contribute for weeks or even months. That isn't fun for the player unless they have multiple characters. So the whole damage / critical wounding system walks the line between realism and what is fun in an RPG.

I don't think there is such a thing as a serious wound! There's damage (which takes you out of action for the battle, at most) and then there's criticals. I'm not talking about criticals (or trauma).

And while what you're saying is practically speaking fine, it's hard for a GM to explain to a certain type of player if they realize how it works.

I mean serious as in "you are going to die" serious verse "a round hits your armour and knocks the breathe out of you".

Getting shot is serious so damage down to incapacitated cannot represent bullets passing through flesh.

Semantics I know.

I have explained "damage" as more of a pain/shock threshold. It comes from many sources. Being incapacitated clearly can't refer to any specific mixture of broken bones, bleeding, etc -- because there are criticals for all of that. But it can refer to any mix of those that makes the body or mind just chemically shut down and give up, more or less.

We agree on that definition.

Incapacitated means being unable to take actions (roll dice). It doesn't mean being unconscious or bleeding out or other life-threatening situations beyond being unable to defend oneself.

I played Rugby when I was younger and I have seen a serious headknock have a player in gar-gar land with concussion. I suffered a concussion as well and have no memory of most of that day. It is really hard to describe what being in that situation is like because your brain isn't working properly. Some people may stagger around aimlessly (think of the scene in Band of Brothers where the German Fallschirmjäger staggers out of the shell-struck building and stands there to be shot.)

However in game mechanic terms treating incapacitation as "you just lie there" is the best way of dealing with non-critical damage.