Directed Fire Question

[wedge_hammersteel]

This happened during our game tonight.

Two Klingon ships are head-on to a Romulan ship.

The Romulan ship has 10 boxes left on front shields.

One Klingon fires regular damage and scores 30 points of damage.

The other Klingon fires directed damage and scores 30 points of damage.

This is my question. Whose damage is applied to the shields and if there is a choice, which player makes it?

Do the shield boxes get subtracted from the regular fire first causing 20 regular internals and 30 directed fire internals?

OR

Do the shield boxes get subtracted from the directed fire first causing 20 directed fire internals and 30 regular internals?

[Drew Klenotic]

That's a really good one. After everyone else weighs in, be sure to tell us what you ultimately decided in that game.

If it were me, honestly, without any ruling from the powers that be, I'd go by 50/50 die roll.

[OGOPTIMUS]

Rule 3D2 says the attacking player resolves each volley in any order he or she chooses, but one volley must be completed before the next one is started.

[wedge_hammersteel]

In our game, Matt (Klingon) decided how to do the volleys and did regular damage first.

[storeylf]

yup, always attacker choice as to order of fire resolution, for any situation where order is important (e.g. hellbores, direct damage). Even without those sort of things it can be important simply in order to prevent battery reinforcement of subsequent volleys or to score multiple small volleys on the DAC rather than 1 large volley.

[edit] - and (as noted above) you shoudn't be looking at whether to do the 30 point regular volley first or the 30 directed volley first, as you should fully resolve each before moving to the next. i.e. you can't roll all your volleys then decide order, you choose one, roll it, resolve any damage then move to the next. Therefore you won't know how much you will do on each volley at the point of choosing the order.

[wedge_hammersteel]

Thanks, OGOPTIMUS

Thats the answer for which we were looking.

[mjwest]

Optimus and Storey got the right answers.

Note that, as Storey points out, once the order of resolution is determined, the second damage rolls should not have been rolled until after the first ship's damage had been rolled and allocated.

[marcus_aurelius]

Allowing the attacker to choose which ship resolves its damage first is especially important the Juggernaut scenario.

In this scenario you need to have the ship(s) not in the rear of Juggernaut fire first to move the shield so the other ship(s) can fire on unshielded engines.

If it was a random determination, then the Juggernaut would get a LOT tougher.