a) is avoidable by splitting them in to five banks.  And part two is math abuse; of course rounding takes over in an example of 9.  A monstrous 12-3+ 1-2-2 Continuing EHD is 120, and becomes 87 when split and recombined.

But declaring at the start of the turn!  Now that's something I totally missed.  Makes Starship Exclusive make much more sense.  That is a hella trade-off if you have to flip the switch before you know what you can shoot at. 

(Making a Fighter-Exclusive that you can switch to a matching Starship Exclusive if there are no fighters on the board isn't abusable since Anti-Fighter is the only bonus you can straight shed in that direction.)

Carry on.  Powergame radar deactivated.

Make sure you factor in the "Boneless is awesome" modifier.  I have a Continuing Catastrophic gun.  Just got 18 evens on 3 dice.  Then 12 hull so 30 damage.

Seriously though, when you balance for expectation, do you give a discount, a bonus, or nothing for increased variability like this?

Heh, I hadn't even considered I'd have it yet, but your post inspired me to check the mail.  Glee!

@P829: Like I shoot five weapons at your dood.  Two hit and three miss.  Regardless of whether or not the three hits do damage, I then get to make a two dice attack at an adjacent hex.  If one of those two then hit, I can make a one die attack in a hex adjacent to it, excluding the original hex.  Chain lightning, say.

@MC: Oh wow, I like that spillover idea too.  It's even better as it lets you blow the patootie out of a small ship without worrying about wasting output.  Hypergraviton even makes sci-sense.  Picks up mass and keeps going.

Spillover: The number of hull hits beyond what is required to kill the target ship can be rolled as an attack against an adjacent hex.

And then both of them could also have "-1 die for each intervening hex" so they don't have to hit adjacent.

Well, I just finished entering all of the ISS book ships in to it so that I could convert them to facet shields and print them in my awesome new output sheet.  There were two annoying ease-of-use things.  Ship equipment isn't all together; I had the hardest time finding Fire Control. 

And secondly, Tech Levels are all over the place.  The normal and ISS rules have Engine, Shield, Equipment, Fighter and Weapons as solid categories.  Leaving per-weapon TL is cool if some setting needs them, but they could be in one place for normal cases.  Oh, and it would be nice to have TL on Template and not Nation since in a campaign it is a per-ship thing.

If an enemy carrier is within 10 hexes, then having fighters launch and attack in the same turn is about equivalent to firing a weapon "3/6/9 6/5+/1/1 No Range Mods".  That's around 42 points.  Fighter flight is 50 points.  Is it just how that feels that is upsetting?  Because it doesn't look unfair.

Yeah, but then you'd have to have a separate weapon called Overloaded Photons.  That's what made me come up with the Fire-time Options thread.  It would be cool if "2x Damage, Carronade" was a mode on the main weapon itself.

From remembering SFB back in the day, I'd switch around the defining characteristics of the Torps and the Phasers. 

Range affected Torps ability to hit from almost-guaranteed to don't-bother-firing.  But they always did the same damage.  Give them Doubled Range Mods (and Slow Firing). 

Phasers had the same chance to hit, but range made them do less damage.  Call that No Range Modifiers and Range Based Damage.

I don't see how to do Overloaded Torps though.  Might be an interesting possibility for a weapon mod.  Variable Power or something.  Can fire at 2xDmg, but then can't fire next turn.  Optional modifiers could be a powerful design thing.  40K plasma works the same way.

I really like this idea of a reactionary weapon.  Another idea that could satisfy the same goal would be the Battlefleet Gothic's rule of putting a fighter flight on CAP in the capital ship's hex.  The first flight to come adjacent to the capital ship trying to attack it gets automatically jumped in to a dogfight.

(I don't think it's a thread hijack if I'm talking on the same subject, but if it is I apologize.  I think a Fighter-Reacts power on a weapon would be totally cool.)

I was worried making the cost less than .9 because then you could add it to everything that you planned to have hit in one turn.  (Although, hitting with plasma on the first turn launched is how you do it in SFB.)  Just worried about flavor vs Munchkin-ability.

Come to think of it, if you were a twink you'd max the speed and use Fading and get a pure size bonus.  Maybe the fade needs to be "Roll a die per hex moved and lose a strength on each 6."  Would still feel like plasma. 

Dude, this forum rules.