In a fit of idle speculation and wishlisting, I was putting together what I think would be the stats and cards for a skipray Blastboat. I'm not the first to engage in this; a few maneuvers has an exhaustive list of skipray variants.

But I quickly noticed that what I was putting together was almost identical to the wave 5 YT2400. The stats, action bar, upgrade bar and ship size are almost exactly what I had in mind.

This has two possible implications: the skipray may not be coming because the 2400 is too close to what the ray should look like, and more immediately relevant- that we may be able to proxy a 2400 with a skipray and have a good fit in terms of capabilities.

It's making me eye gosric's take on the skipray model very closely...

Not to question your rulemaking abilities, but if I were designing a Skipray for X-Wing, I'd probably give it a higher base attack than 2.

I see where you're coming from: the base attack of 2, in the turret, represents the Skipray's laser cannon turret, and the cannon slot could represent the Skipray's 3 ion cannons. That's reasonable if you're going to proxy...I say go for it!

The problem with how ion cannons are handled in this game is that they're an either/or option, and that's not really how I see the Skipray (to be honest, it's not really how I ever used ion cannon-equipped ships in TIE Fighter, either, but the game isn't designed around my childhood gaming sessions). A Skipray has a combined 5 ion/laser cannons, but if those are split up across primary/secondary in the game, it really doesn't have all that much firepower. I realize that this isn't a unique problem for the Skipray (heck, the TIE Defender has a combined six cannons, and it has a base attack of 3), but for a larger base ship it would become more important (I would think) to solve the 2 attack base problem.

Something that would be very interesting for FFG to experiment with down the line would be a pilot skill or unique talent or crew that would enable you to fire both primary AND secondary in a given combat phase. Obviously this would be extremely powerful and would have to be appropriately costly, but on a ship the size of the Skipray (or Decimator, for that matter), I don't see why it couldn't or shouldn't happen.

I would equip the Skipray like this: 2/2/3/4

With a cannon slot and a 360 degree primary turret. I would give it a unique to the Skipray Ion cannon weapon at 5 points. You can call it a medium ion cannon or linked ion cannons, something like that. They would do the same as the normal ion cannon, but the special ability would be that it would disable a ship upgrade card until the Ion token is removed. So it would be something like this: If this attack hits, the ship recieves one damage and one Ion token. The player chooses a ship upgrade card and flips it face down until all Ion tokens are removed.

It would have a similar dial to the Tie Bomber with a 4 K-turn instead of 5. Upgrades would be Cannon, Crew, System and Missile.

Not to question your rulemaking abilities, but if I were designing a Skipray for X-Wing, I'd probably give it a higher base attack than 2.

It's either in the Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels or on Wookiepedia where it mentions the Skipray as being considered a capital ship, not for its size, but the raw strength of its weapons I think we could reasonably see it as a 1 epic point "huge" ship or a large ship that costs 1 epic point and is epic only with a hardpoint (either a turbolaser, or quad cannon)for its turret, and then have a primary attack of 3-4 with a canon slot for its main arc I think

imo the VT-49 is much closer to the skipray blastboat than the outrider. I was a little bit disappointed when they announced the VT-49 since it means the skipray may never get in the game due to being too similar and both ships are already extremely niche.

In terms of making the skipray a unique ship within the game there are a few ways they could go with it. perhaps it could have heavy firepower in main forward arc (attack 4?) and turret upgrade slot. Lumbering shuttle-like dial so its hard to bring those guns to bear, but with an ion turret they could set up their own shots

I'm a big fan of the Skipray and I think it could be an interesting inclusion for the Imperials. I don't think it has a lot in common with the Decimator other than it's turret, though.

It's weapons system loadout is also interesting from the game's point of view, as it's main weapon was actually considered to be it's Ion Cannons rather than it's turret.

So, I would personally go something like

Attack 3

Defence 2

Hull 4

Shields 4

But to make the Skipray unique I would give it a rule which makes it's primary weapon an ion weapon, then give it the following loadout:

Turret Upgrade (and give it the rare Blaster Turret card)

Crew Upgrade

Torpedoes/Missiles

Torpedoes/Missiles

That should make it a sufficiently unique large ship...

Something that would be very interesting for FFG to experiment with down the line would be a pilot skill or unique talent or crew that would enable you to fire both primary AND secondary in a given combat phase. Obviously this would be extremely powerful and would have to be appropriately costly, but on a ship the size of the Skipray (or Decimator, for that matter), I don't see why it couldn't or shouldn't happen.

Would have to be expensive, but I don't inherently object to this: two (or even three) 2-3 dice attacks are more fair than piling all the attack dice together into one unevadable auto-kill shot.

Kind of similar to my thoughts for the Assault/Missile Gunboats - I'd really like to see a modification which grants the ability to alpha strike by dumping more than one missile simultaneously...

I don't see an issue with keeping the skipray stats similar to other large ships but giving it two cannon slots and some unique upgrades, such as for cannon:

Multiple-Ion Cannons (6)
Attack: Attack 1 ship. If this attack hits the target ship, the ship suffers 1 damage and receives 2 Ion tokens. Then cancel all die results. Attack value: 4, Range: 1 to 3.

And for modification:

Linked Canon Array (5)

After performing an attack with a cannon (regardless of whether you hit), if you have a target-lock on the target you may spend it to perform an attack with a different equipped cannon.

Yeah I wouldn't get hung up on the ion cannon translation with the skipray, it would be fixed with special rule that lets it do either an additional damage or dole out more tokens to represent its focus on them.

Something that would be very interesting for FFG to experiment with down the line would be a pilot skill or unique talent or crew that would enable you to fire both primary AND secondary in a given combat phase. Obviously this would be extremely powerful and would have to be appropriately costly, but on a ship the size of the Skipray (or Decimator, for that matter), I don't see why it couldn't or shouldn't happen.

Would have to be expensive, but I don't inherently object to this: two (or even three) 2-3 dice attacks are more fair than piling all the attack dice together into one unevadable auto-kill shot.

Kind of similar to my thoughts for the Assault/Missile Gunboats - I'd really like to see a modification which grants the ability to alpha strike by dumping more than one missile simultaneously...

If it was costed correctly, I think the multiple-missile card would be pretty sweet.

I do think it would have to be pretty expensive to stay balanced though. Being able to rip off a pair of assault missiles and drop two damage on an entire cluster of ships would be pretty devastating. I would say the card that allows that to be done would need to be in the 10 point range, or the pilot card with that ability would need to be costed at or above the Falcon uniques.

Say 48-49 for the ship with that ability, or 9-10 for the upgrade card. If the ship came with the pilot ability, the upgrade could stay in the 5-6 point range.

How about the cluster missiles, being able to let go of 4 attacks in one turn on a non-Huge ship would be pretty amazing.

If you consider the streaky tendency of FFG dice, 4 attacks in one turn will either miss entirely or completely obliterate one ship regardless of base size (epic not included).

Not to question your rulemaking abilities, but if I were designing a Skipray for X-Wing, I'd probably give it a higher base attack than 2.

It's either in the Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels or on Wookiepedia where it mentions the Skipray as being considered a capital ship, not for its size, but the raw strength of its weapons...

(1) Punctuation, for the love of everything holy. You're no SoulCrusherEx, but a couple of periods would have been nice.

(2) This particular zombie misconception comes from the old West End Games RPG, where it was indeed classified as a capital ship to reflect that it was carrying capital-ship grade weapons. Then someone decided to add that to the Wookieepedia article as if it were an in-universe thing as opposed to a convenient category in an RPG stat block, and we were off to the races.

But "capital-grade weaponry" is actually nothing new: lots of freighters and the occasional fighter have weapons on that scale, and we don't assign Epic points to (e.g.) the Falcon. So the Skipray can be portrayed in this game just fine as a Large ship (or even a big small-based ship, depending on what LFL has to say about size issues).

(2)

Something that would be very interesting for FFG to experiment with down the line would be a pilot skill or unique talent or crew that would enable you to fire both primary AND secondary in a given combat phase. Obviously this would be extremely powerful and would have to be appropriately costly, but on a ship the size of the Skipray (or Decimator, for that matter), I don't see why it couldn't or shouldn't happen.

Would have to be expensive, but I don't inherently object to this: two (or even three) 2-3 dice attacks are more fair than piling all the attack dice together into one unevadable auto-kill shot.

Kind of similar to my thoughts for the Assault/Missile Gunboats - I'd really like to see a modification which grants the ability to alpha strike by dumping more than one missile simultaneously...

If it was costed correctly, I think the multiple-missile card would be pretty sweet.

I do think it would have to be pretty expensive to stay balanced though. Being able to rip off a pair of assault missiles and drop two damage on an entire cluster of ships would be pretty devastating. I would say the card that allows that to be done would need to be in the 10 point range, or the pilot card with that ability would need to be costed at or above the Falcon uniques.

Say 48-49 for the ship with that ability, or 9-10 for the upgrade card. If the ship came with the pilot ability, the upgrade could stay in the 5-6 point range.

How about the cluster missiles, being able to let go of 4 attacks in one turn on a non-Huge ship would be pretty amazing.

If you consider the streaky tendency of FFG dice, 4 attacks in one turn will either miss entirely or completely obliterate one ship regardless of base size (epic not included).

Oh, true. Balance will require quite a cost, because you must logically be doing the same damage output of two twenty-odd-point bombers....

Making it a title might be one way to keep it pinned to a specific ship (I've less of an issue with a large ship doing it), and you could assign other requirements to make it work.

Not to question your rulemaking abilities, but if I were designing a Skipray for X-Wing, I'd probably give it a higher base attack than 2.

It's either in the Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels or on Wookiepedia where it mentions the Skipray as being considered a capital ship, not for its size, but the raw strength of its weapons...

(1) Punctuation, for the love of everything holy. You're no SoulCrusherEx, but a couple of periods would have been nice.

(2) This particular zombie misconception comes from the old West End Games RPG, where it was indeed classified as a capital ship to reflect that it was carrying capital-ship grade weapons. Then someone decided to add that to the Wookieepedia article as if it were an in-universe thing as opposed to a convenient category in an RPG stat block, and we were off to the races.

But "capital-grade weaponry" is actually nothing new: lots of freighters and the occasional fighter have weapons on that scale, and we don't assign Epic points to (e.g.) the Falcon. So the Skipray can be portrayed in this game just fine as a Large ship (or even a big small-based ship, depending on what LFL has to say about size issues).

(2)

It depends on how they would incorporate the turbolaser turret. We could see a new normal turret upgrade for it, or they give it the hardpoint. The hardpoint would basically force it into a "huge" ship because of the energy required for the weapons. I would like to see it available for normal play but I would rather see it in epic only than not at all

imo the VT-49 is much closer to the skipray blastboat than the outrider. I was a little bit disappointed when they announced the VT-49 since it means the skipray may never get in the game due to being too similar and both ships are already extremely niche.

In terms of making the skipray a unique ship within the game there are a few ways they could go with it. perhaps it could have heavy firepower in main forward arc (attack 4?) and turret upgrade slot. Lumbering shuttle-like dial so its hard to bring those guns to bear, but with an ion turret they could set up their own shots

It's dial would need to be significantly better than a shuttle, or at least it needs a K-turn on the dial because in the Thrawn Trilogy books, Luke is almost able to do a K-turn in it. (He failed because he was too close to some trees.)