Quick question about what happens if you fire a nova cannon at a squadron.
Say you have two swords and firestorm in a squadron, the firestorm is at the back and gets hit with a nova cannon template dead on for say 5 points of damage. What happens now?
- Firestorm gets to suck up 5 points of damage, effectively the template allowing it to be sniped out of the squadron.
- Squadron rules say nearest ship gets hit, a sword sucks up 5 points of damage.
- Something else?
The best way to understand this is a Nova Cannon is like an artillery barrage in space. If you get a dead-on hit on a Firestorm and roll a 5, the Firestorm just took four damage hits (plus one for its shield). It's dead x4 unless it was braced, in which case it would have to roll FOUR brace dice, with any one failure killing it.
Now if any other escorts were close enough nearby that the NC template covers their base as as well (but not the center hole), then each which's base is touched by the NC template takes one automatic hit, absorbed by shields so each one gets a blast marker in contact. This all happens at the same time so if any are in base contact, its
not like one gets a BM, causing the other to lose its shields so now the second gets an automatic damage hit, etc. Escorts not touched by the NC template take no damage at all, regardless of how many hits were rolled against the squadron.
The shooting player can place the template anywhere desired before rolling for scatter so if the NC template is placed directly between two ships' bases and a dead-on is rolled for five hits, BOTH ships take the full amount of damage. Nova Cannon can be quite deadly to ships that are clustered too close together.
- Nate
