@afterimagedan What do you mean by reduced damage to necrons? They don't take less damage from standard plasma torpedoes, so why would they take less from a massive plasma explosion? More importantly, what is the WR #14 rules vs. necrons?
I kind of see both sides of this argument; one hand the suggested profile makes the Nova Cannon impossible to spam and generally more deadly, albeit requiring yet another special order from a fleet that has to make one for every other ship, every turn. That is a fairly significant drawback, we are suggesting all these profiles on the thought that the NC vessel will be locked on: as an IN player I know as well as you all do that over two thirds of your ships already require RO special orders or LO, and making NC lock on to be effective makes it so that literraly everything but your gun escorts will be on SO all the time, and IN have only stock leadership. On the other hand it does really go against the spirit of the NC, which is a devastating mega doom blast that can envelop whole escort squadrons and reduce them to ash.
Not sure which side I stand on, but I do know this; in fluff anyway (plus rogue trader), it can fire less often (every other turn). I know in BFG if it only fired every other turn, it could be a lot more powerful at any rate.
And that a bigger pieplate isn't feasible for this game, even though the NC template should be the small blast template from w40k.