I hope they tested the butts out of this mechanic. I could see it going awfully awry. Either we will end up never using a Jamming beam (because it comes at the expense of your attack, and you ultimately win by removing opponent's ships from the table, not from disabling them) or they'll be used with the regularity of a Tractor beam and will tend to slow the game down. Admittedly, we do see Tractor Beams sometimes because moving enemy ships onto asteroids is actually pretty good. But typically, unlike ion cannons or fletchette cannons, neither Jamming beams nor Tractor beams do their own damage, so opting to use them (instead of a primary weapon or a secondary weapon that does more damage) means you're planning to wait a whole round before doing the damage that advances the end of the game.
I suspect we will see some upgrade cards or pilot cards that make use of the "Jammed" condition (something like, "when attacking a ship that is Jammed, you may re-roll attack dice or whatever"), but tbh I am a little disappointed with the lack of stuff that takes advantage of a similar condition: having Tractor beam tokens. It seems to me that they created this really interesting mechanic, gave it to the G1-A Mist Hunter and the Quadjumper, but never fully actualized it. I wish we had seen crew or secondary weapons that had taken advantage of Tractor beams, even if only to help hurry the game along (since attacking with a Tractor beam sacrifices that turn's worth of damage). Something like, "When attacking, you may spend 1 Tractor Beam token assigned to the defender to re-roll any or all attack dice." The lack of such investment in the Tractor Beam makes me disappointed to see them introduce a new beam weapon they might equally ignore.
Maybe they will redeem it by creating a pilot or a card who takes advantage of both conditions: "If the defender has either a Tractor Beam or Jamming Beam token assigned to it, you may do some more damage to them and stuff."
