Great! I was hoping for your input, Chris, since it’s obviously essential. Let’s contemplate how to depict them.
The armor sounds like a supersized version of Iron’s “hardened and shielded” trait: instead of reducing Vehicular-scale damage to Human-scale as Iron does, an armored fortress might be able to reduce Superstructural-scale damage to Vehicular-scale. [EDIT: I crossposted with Mike/Countercheck, but I think his description of the armor sounds reasonable].
The Q-beams might be portrayed as a highly modified Battery with an extra level of Long Range (“beyond artillery”), an accuracy penalty, the Megablast trait, and a Trait Limitation to reflect firing into/out of atmospheres.
Question: Why can Q-beams fire out of atmospheres/dust clouds but not into them?
We’re at the limits of my physics knowledge here, but I’m remembering the “meson gun” from Traveller, which generated particles that didn’t interact with matter, allowing them to pass through obstacles and armor until they dropped into realspace (or whatever they did) at the targeted point. Let’s assume the Q-beams are generating and firing anti-particles (anti-mesons? anti-neutrinos?) of some kind, and they’re fairly innaccurate, as you said, which in this context means it’s difficult to control exactly when the “Q beam” starts interacting with matter. That means that if you’re firing out of an atmosphere or a dust cloud, it’s fairly easy to tweak the beam to something like “don’t interact with matter until you’ve gone at least 100 km,” but if you’re firing at a target inside at atmosphere, it’s very difficult to tweak the beam to the finesse of “don’t interact with matter until you’ve gone 9,999 km, but when you reach 10,000, drop into realspace”: The Q-beam would tend to fall short, interact with the upper atmosphere, and create an unpleasantly radioactive but militarily useless artificial aurora borealis, or overshoot, interact with the planet’s crust, and create minor seismic disturbances.