I had intended to come back after I'd thought about EER more but I haven't thought of anything that ties to the idea of energy reserves that would be interesting and not already mentioned. I'm not sure that I like the idea of entirely negating the downsides for SO with EER though. Too much of a boost I think.
I would think Vaaish's version would work well as "Reduce the ships minimum distance required to turn by 5cm" This would go well as an addition to the FAQ2010 rules.
Going this route might have implications outside of just letting a ship turn a bit sooner, I opted to go with the classes because they are fairly airtight in rules definition. There's less room for argumentation, but -5cm also works in most of the cases I can think of at the moment. It just needs a bit more thought to make sure we aren't opening any holes.
Vaaish's idea is to resolve all shield hits at the highest armor for the ship. I would say maybe just level it as all shield hits must be a 6, the highest armor on just about all of the ships anyway. Would this just count for weapons batteries or lances too?
It would only affect weapons that roll against the armor value. I didn't want to give it a fixed 6+ because I felt it could be too much of a crutch. Giving it to a CL with 5+ armor all around it doesn't do a whole lot. Giving it to a battleship or cruiser with a 6+ prow and it becomes much more valuable... which incidentally puts it into competition with AWR as a defensive foil to the boosted offense. Going fixed 6+ reverses this and makes it more desirable on low armor ships.
Vaaish opted to add a re-roll for 1's
Again this is a foil to AWR without a considerable boost in power. AWR benefits long range shooting while GSTM helps shorter ranged ships boost into combat without taking as big of a hit (weapons are at 75% when going on AAF etc) The reroll of ones only shows up around 16% of the time but is always active so it gives you consistent utility and adds a fun dynamic when it comes into effect.
For each
hit against the shields, roll a D6, the hit is ignored
and no blast marker is placed. This effect goes
away if the ship suffers “Shields Collapsed†critical
damage. (Andrew version)
I don't think I like this particular mechanic for two reasons. I think it brings more dice rolling than necessary into the turn sequence even though the refit is in the BBB. I'm also not fond of using an already existing rule as part of a different rule especially copied verbatim because it opens things up for confusion down the road.