Nothing in the rulebook say, hints, implies, or supports a conclusion that all weapons are 360° at range zero. Firing arcs work like the rulebook says the work, and those same rules have been used in SFB for 30 years without anybody being confused at all. Somebody is just trying to make his house rule mesh with the rulebook, and it won't. The rulebook is just fine until you start inserting imaginary new rules, only then does it get confusing.
Whilst I seem to be dealing with range 0 arcs the way expected, I had to laugh at your assertion on the rules being so clear (or even more bizarrly, explicit as your last post said).
This is isn't SFB. New younger players probably have no idea how SFB works, and younger players (the 10+ age group the game claims to be suitable for) in particular are less likley to have extensive experience of similiar games. How do you know no one was confused by SFB? when I played SFB about 25 years ago we couldn't have asked the question if we wanted - the internet wasn't exactly widely used back then! we weren't going to make an international phone call from a signifiacntly different time zone to ask you in person, and only the more serious gamers were likely to even think of writing for an answer. The internet and on line forums for games make it far easier for casual/younger gamers with questions to ask them rather than just come up with their own answers like we used to have to do.
Which part of the rule book explicitly says how firing arcs are calculated at range 0. I find no reference to such a thing at all.
What I can see explicitly, is that section 3B has a nice set of diagrams showing which hexes each arc can fire into, note (in my rev 4 rule book) that non of the diagrams show the ships own hex as shaded. Inference 1 - a ship cannot fire into its own hex. Alternative inference 2 - firing arcs do not matter at range 0, all weapons are in arc at range 0. Alternative inference 3 - the rules forgot to cover it.
The section on shield facing covers, and I quote, "which shield was hit", and nothing else. Inference - this rule clearly expects range 0 shooting as it has a rule covering it, therefore inference 1 above seems unlikely, and inference 2 most likely. Alternatlively, Inference 4 - mechanism for working out shields at range 0 is also meant to apply to working out firing arcs, in one way this is the weakest inference - if you are working out something about weapon arcs then inferences from the weapon arc section not unreasonably trump inferences from sections on shields.
Explicit rules covering arcs at range 0 = 0.
Implied rules or inferences covering range 0 arcs = 4.
Some other points that have come up in this thread.
the shield facings pretty must directly imply what the weapons in arc will be
The shield you have facing the enemy does not directly determine your weapons that can fire on said enemy, there is some correlation but one doesn't cause the other. Someone to whom I show shield number 2 could be to my R or RF or both. I could shoot a ship on my R, whilst being shot through either the 2 or 3 shield.
Fairly Simple case: Ship A is in hex 21, facing D. Ship B is in hex 32, facing A. In this case, both ships have their #6 shields facing each other. Ship A turns left (no facing C) and enter's Ship B's hex. To determine the shield facing in this case, we again follow (3C6d) and move Ship A to its previous position. Note, however, that the movement occurred AFTER the turn. So, when we move Ship A back to its original hex, it is facing C, not D.
There is an implied statement here that on the sub-pulse of the move into the same hex the order of turn and move is somehow important. Rule 3C6d, however, seems very amibigous to me. We use the position of the ship on the subpulse
before it entered the hex. Is 'before' referring to the 'subpulse before', or 'before it entered the hex'. My reading is that we go back an extra sub-pulse, so if ship turns and moves into the same hex on subpulse 4 then we go back to sub-pulse 3 to determine shields, as that was the sub-pulse before it entered the hex. That implies that the order of events on the sub-pulse of the move is irrelevant, non of those events had occured at that point. The second interpretation just seems to tortured to me, the reference to subpulse in that case appears pretty meaningless as 'position before it entered the hex' needs no obvious reference to subpulses at all.
