The ion card rule states you remove all ion tokens at once.
My brother convinced me this freed him from the 2nd ion token my ion pulse missile gifted him.
Is he correct?
Ion Pulse Missiles
The ion card rule states you remove all ion tokens at once.
My brother convinced me this freed him from the 2nd ion token my ion pulse missile gifted him.
Is he correct?
Yes. The 2 Ion token effect is to allow the missles to ionize a large ship with 1 hit.
Small-based ships will be Ionized after a single Ion Token.
Large-based ships, however, need 2 to be Ionized.
Ion tokens don't get cleared until the Ionized movement takes place, so you CAN ionize a Firespray with a single Ion Cannon, so long as you spend two turns to do so.
The Ion Pulse Missile will simply Ionize whatever it hits, regardless of its size.
This is correct. The advantage of ion pulse missiles hitting a target with 2 ion tokens is that it will affect a large ship in a single hit, instead of the two it would take from other ion weapons. Once an ionized ship performs its mandatory 1 forward maneuver, all ion tokens are discarded, no matter how many.
P.S. I mean no disrespect, but this probably should have been posted in the rules forum...
* Ninja'd... 
Oh, I did not know that. I thought they double-dipped when hitting small ships - no wonder they seemed so powerful to me.