Federation Commander

It doesn't say otherwise on the ship card, so does the O-DN has a drone control limit of 6? I'm pretty sure that's right. It doesn't mention any different in the ship description either.

So then, why are there 12 drone damage tracks on the card?

The drone damage tracks are tied to launchers, not to the number of drones in flight. For whatever reason (spare hits, avoid reloading issues, etc...) a player might decide to put a drone in every weapon hardpoint. So the ship has enough drone damage tracks for that.

Quite a few ships feature more drone damage racks than they can actually use; for example, most Klingon cruisers have 8 damage tracks, the C7 and all dreadnaughts have 16 damage tracks. I think it is just a way to prevent leaving lots of empty space on the cards.

Sneaky Scot wrote:Quite a few ships feature more drone damage racks than they can actually use; for example, most Klingon cruisers have 8 damage tracks, the C7 and all dreadnaughts have 16 damage tracks. I think it is just a way to prevent leaving lots of empty space on the cards.

Not exactly...

While I'm not familiar with the layout on the Orion Dreadnought, I am familiar with the layout of the drone tracks on the Klingon Cruisers. You'll note that on the cruisers, the drone tracks are arranged in groups of four. Each group of four is tied to one launcher. The D7 has 2 launchers, and you have two groups of drone damage tracks with four drones in each group. What this allows you to do is to track the damage on each individual drone from the launcher. When the launcher is reloaded, you erase the damage inflicted on the drones, and start over again.

I never though of using it that way - thanks Junior!

I'm not so sure that was how it was intended in the first instance (I seem to remember some question and answer type thing relating to this, where the answer was that damage tracks are basically given on an "as many as we can fit" basis), but it sounds like a sensible idea all the same. Nice one.