Came up over the weekend while playing a casual game.

An X-Wing had R3-A2 equipped and the text of the card reads "When you declare the target of your attack, if the defender is inside your firing arc, you may receive 1 stress token to cause the defender to receive 1 stress token."

Before my X-Wing got to shoot, it took the crit "Blinded Pilot".

The "Blinded Pilot" card reads "The next time you attack, do not roll any attack dice. Then flip this card facedown."

The question was could I still trigger R3-A2's ability.

(rereading both cards now, I think I should have been able to trigger R3-A2's ability.)

Yes, blinded pilot only reduces the dice rolled to zero. It does not bar you from making that attack, in fact if you didn't you would not be able to flip over the blinded pilot crit.

R3A2 works when you declare the attack so would work in the scenario you defined.

Yes, blinded pilot only reduces the dice rolled to zero. It does not bar you from making that attack, in fact if you didn't you would not be able to flip over the blinded pilot crit.

R3A2 works when you declare the attack so would work in the scenario you defined.

As a small aside, in the case of hobbie, would you be able to spend a target lock to remove the stress in the OP's scenario? The rulebook, pg 11 under combat bonuses hints that the attack would end immediately if the attacker rolled 0 dice, but it doesn't explicitly say that. If that's the case you wouldn't move on to the modify attack dice stage, and you wouldn't get the opportunity to spend that target lock. Any opinions?

That little section only says that the attack does no damage. I would read that to mean that you are, technically, supposed to go through the whole process still, and you can spend whatever tokens you want. Most of the time there's no point, so both players happily short-cut it, but if you do have a reason to want to burn those tokens (Hobbie with TLs, Garven with Focuses), you can.

What Dr4co said. The attack goes through the whole process, regardless of how many dice the attacker rolled or the results of that roll.