Federation Commander

Vladimyr · Ensign Joined: 29 Nov 2006 Posts: 20

But what happens when the shield is 10 points, and I reinforce it to absorb the extra damage?

In this case, the shield was not penetrated (as I reinforced it). This would mean that the burn through would penetrate armor and hit internal systems, no?

I thought that I should only reinforce the shield to one point below the damage caused, in order to ensure that the armor takes the hit, and not other internal systems (because in that case, there would be no burn through at all).

junior · Captain Joined: 08 May 2007 Posts: 803

On the surface, you're probably right.

Taking a deeper look, though, you may be wrong. It depends on the circumstances (and at this point we move from Rules Questions to Tactics).

Burn through will only affect a single system on your ship. Depending on the Damage Control rating on your ship, you may be able to repair the damage at the end of the turn. If you're playing Squadron Scale, then your ship will have a Damage Control rating of at least 2, which guarantees that you can repair any yellow box. A Damage Control rating of 3 guarantees that you can repair a power hit before that hit actually affects your power (since you calculate available power after you repair damage). A Damage Control rating of 4 allows you to repair weapons - which means that if you either already fired the weapon that gets disabled then it's irrelevant.

Basically, if you haven't taken any internal damage and your opponent scores a single point of burn through damage and rolls a '3' on the Damage Chart, then who cares?

So depending on your Damage Control rating, that single point of burn through might be a non-issue. And it might be in your best interest to let it through instead of losing armor (which is much more difficult to repair).

mjwest · Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 3:11 am Post subject:

Actually, in the case of a 10 point volley on a 10 point shield, I believe you will still have a shield box left and take a point of burn through.

But as to why use the battery power to keep the last shield box and bypass armor: so that you still have that last shield box. If you let the damage hit, and take it on the armor, you may be better off in that specific volley. But if you save that last shield box, you will save your ability to reinforce that shield in the next volley, which will likely save you a handful of internals in that volley.

But, as Junior points out, that starts to get us directly into tactics.

When the threshold of burn through is perfectly hit, you can get slightly wonky results. It is just how it works.
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defurusu · Posted: Fri May 23, 2008 11:11 am Post subject:

As I understand it, in the case of a 10-point volley on a 10-box shield there is no choice to make: there is 1 point of burn-through and a 1-box shield remaining, no matter what the target does. Of course the target could use Reinforcement, but the point of burn-through is not changed by this.

If the volley is a few points larger, a ship with Armour can choose to just let the Armour burn or (if it has the spare energy and enough Batteries) spend energy to reduce the damage to a single point of burn-through, which will always be on a system with a shorter time to Repair.

In an extreme example of this, a target receiving an 11-point volley on such a 10-point shield can choose to spend 1 point of energy which both preserves a shield box for the future (which is always more energy-efficient than repairing it in the future) and turns the 1 internal into burn-through. Sounds like a win-win to me, especially for a ship with a Dam Con rating of 4.