Alright.

I have seen this debated to death over card text and cross-references to the rule book text and blah blah blah, but never any official word.

If I land a hit on you with my ion cannon and you still have 25 shield tokens guarding your precious snub fighter, are you still ionized after losing a shield token to damage, or do I have to widdle away all of your shields to ionized you?

Personally, I'm an old school X-Wing and TIE Fighter on PC type of gamer (floppy disks 4 life!), so my roots tell me you need to blow away the shields first before you can hit the hull with any sweet ion action.

You take the ion token regardless of whether the damage goes to shields or hull.

I guess, from a canonical pov, you could consider the the Imp SDs shields in ESB weren't down when the Ion Cannon hit it - it was certainly still affected by the blast, allowing the Transport to escape..... "The first transport is away, the first transport is away"

Of course you are. What's the debate about? The rulebook is quite clear on what qualifies as being hit, ion weapons trigger on the target being hit. Apart from the forthcoming Lt. Blount (who is very straightforward), and a corner case with draw their fire, there isn't anything to question.

"Were all my (filled and open) explosion symbols cancelled? No? Then you are hit. Things that trigger when you are hit happen.

25 shields or not, you still get ionized. Through some form of arcane witchcraft, ion blasts ignore shields. I seem to remember playing X-Wing vs TIE Fighter on my PC many moons ago, and ionizing ships with shields.

I seem to remember playing X-Wing vs TIE Fighter on my PC many moons ago, and ionizing ships with shields.

It's been way too long since I played the game, but I seem to remember that that might have been a toggle in the difficulty settings.

You should also consider that the effects of being ionized in this game are very different from what they were in the video games. In this game if you get ionized the only thing that happens is your next move is determined for you; other than that you can act normally except for any "reveal dial" things. In the video game if you were ionized you lost all control and could not longer fire your weapons; when ionized your options were extremely limited.