Federation Commander

hey guys, this issue arose in last nights game (combat Rally) where a Gorn CC launched plasmas at a Fed CC and the CC was in heavy roids. The question that arose was would the plasma Torp take Heavy roid damage before impact from movement into the hex, or would it impact the target ship?

seeing as SVC was present for this game session in particular at the time of question, he ruled it as "just as with SFB, the torpedo would impact the target instead of taking Heavy roid damage"

so i guess this is more of a regular post regarding something that could come up in other sessions, instead of a question about roid rules

Actually - let's tell the whole story:

Hydran ship, moving at speed 8 sitting in a heavy asteroid hex...
Gorn plasma torpedo targeted on Hydran, and moving at speed 32...
The Plasma Torpedo enters the heavy asteroid hex the Hydran ship is already in and strikes the Hydran on shield # 4.

The question is: Does the plasma torpedo take damage from entering the asteroid hex before it strikes the shield or does it strike the shield w/o taking asteroid damage?

Nothing in the rules designates,so we deferred to Steve (since he was present). SVC was as perplexed as we were and called Petrick. Petrick's call was, "No, the plasma does not take asteroid damage - it just strikes the ship." We played out the rest of the scenario based on that decision.

Since the hex is soooooo much larger than the ship itself, I challenged the ruling. Steve will discuss it with Petrick and mjwest and issue a final ruling.

Saying that the weapon impacts ahead of taking damage to itself is the correct ruling. (Well, since Steve declared it, it is by definition correct, but let's ignore that for the moment. )

In the example following rule (6B2d), it gives the example of a drone entering an asteroid hex. The last sentence says, "f the drone's target was in the hex, the drone would damage the target before it takes asteroid damage."

So, the rule was already there. It was just inelegantly placed in the example, rather than the rule proper.

Bummer - I (and Steve) looked all through the rules for Drones / Plasmas / and Asteroids and neither of us found it.

Oh well. Guess I lost my challenge to the ruling by Steve. It's a good thing that it didn't affect the outcome of the game.