I thought of this before. Mass Driver cannon, priced highly, cannot crit. 3 Damage. Not sure if range 2 or 3.

MASS DRIVERS? But there are laws... treaties...

Treaties and laws men like Tyber Zann apparently gave no ***** about.

I'm thinking the effect would need to be "if the attack hits cancel all die results and deal one damage card to the target ship." If you want to make it a little more useful you could go and add "If the target has no shield tokens then deal that card face up."

You can argue range and attack dice specifics all you like but that's how I'd see the benefit working.

I think this sounds very intriguing, but yeah, such a cannon would need to be carefully balanced.

I think it would make ships like the b-wing worthless

It would mean the rise of the TIE Bomber as the world's finest Tanky Boat.

It would be more appealing if there were more cards that interacted with damage cards. Something that deals damage through shields (but less than a normal attack would), for instance, could have a positive interaction with Saboteur. But... I can't think of anything else, really.

We have ships and weapons that ignore arc dodging and agility, which quite a few ships rely on to... be. Why not weapons that ignore shields so that the ships that rely on those can know what it feels like?

The problem I see is that it is really an idea that counters a faction.

The ships that would fear a shield canceling mechanic are : x-wing, e-wing, b-wing, defender.

So if you go against rebels, it would be really good. But if you go against imps, it would be almost useless.

In a game group(such as mine) where we play reb v. imp almost exclusively, it will be overpowered and have to cost more than HLC to be balanced, but in a tourney setting, it would be a complete waste of points about half the time. In order to make it useful, you would have to find a way to make it worth a slot against ships with no shields, but a little better vs. shielded ships.

We have ships and weapons that ignore arc dodging and agility, which quite a few ships rely on to... be. Why not weapons that ignore shields so that the ships that rely on those can know what it feels like?

Funny thing is story wise the Empire made a weapon to take away the protective advantage of shield, it is the SFS Ls 9.3 LASER cannon. The only fighters I have seen survive a single beam from this weapon is a BTL-S3, shot the body connecting starboard engine, any other part shot was a 1 shot kill. The other fighters are Bs Es Ks Vs and Ts. They are on this list just cause weve never seen them fight fighters with the 9.3.

The problem with weapons that bypass shields are that they can 1-shot SOOOOOO many of the newer ships.

A-Wings, Z-95s, E-Wings, Phantoms.... All 1-shotted by a direct hit face-up. In some of those cases you are looking at a 40+ point ship 1 shotted by a new cannon... I fear it would be unbalanced. There's just too much new stuff with only two hull.

This isn't as bad as it sounds. If one-shotting an expensive toy in such a way became too common, I have no doubt that the meta would adapt.

Sure, taking the Hull Upgrade to protect against a one-shot might mean having to forego something like Advanced Cloaking Device, but anything that makes such choices less obvious is a good thing in my book

Are we talking about a canon cannon,a non canon cannon, or a head canon cannon?

We're talking about canyons. We all have accents.

Perhaps "Proton cannon" range 3, if you hit cancel all dice resuts and deal a face up damage card.

This is clearly the better suggestion here. Similar to existing mechanics, not very text heavy, and doesn't need to be limited by high cost or reduced range. Maybe five points?

Yeah, this ones my fault, we were talking about the SIth Infiltrator and i saw the "Solar Ionization Cannons" on the Wookiepedia entry and put it as the Scimitar title: 7 pts, Half the damage dealt by the Sith Infiltrator's Primary attacks bypass shields, rounded up.

For a cannon i'd put it like something as

Attack: Attack 1 ship. Immediately after rolling your attack dice, you must change all your Crit results to Hit results. Each uncancelled Hit result deals 1 Facedown damage card. Attack value: 3. Range: 1-2. 6 pts.

When you take a look at it shields are nothing more than 1 hit point. You just can't flip a card face up and have an effect. Most face up cards only do 1 damage anyways and many face up cards have no effect to certain pilots or are quickly resolved (flip back face down) the following turn. It takes the same # of hits to kill a B-wing as it does to kill a Y-wing. Same for Defenders and bombers as well for E-wing and X-wings.

As of now only the Imperials have measures to deal directly a face up damage with proton bombs and Vader Crew. So there is some shield ignoring power for Imperials to bust shielded rebel ships. If you want a cannon that can go through shields it has to be something that requires exact conditions such as requiring focus tokens to be spent on critical hits or have something similar to the ion effect where it cancels all dice results and deals 1 face up damage that get flipped over at the end of the next combat phase. Shilds do act as sort of a hard shell but they have been pretty easy to crack. The most heavily shielded craft such as B-wing and Defenders or on their last leg once their shield is down.

Ewok catapult (rebel only): Hits casue the defending ship to be assigned an Ewok token. While ships posess an Ewok token all their dice count as blank and cannot spend focus or be rerolled. When an Ewok token is assigned the rebel player must sing Yub Nub continuously. If the rebel player stops singing remove all Ewok tokens from all ships.

For a cannon i'd put it like something as

Attack: Attack 1 ship. Immediately after rolling your attack dice, you must change all your Crit results to Hit results. Each uncancelled Hit result deals 1 Facedown damage card. Attack value: 3. Range: 1-2. 6 pts.

Don't forget to cancel those hit results after dealing the damage cards, or they'll still then go on to cause further damage

Another thing to keep in mind is how can it be broken: In this case, give the cannon to Rexler Brath and giggle insanely as he tears ships apart left, right and centre.

Come to think about it, that could be a good way to tear down fat Han...

If we still think it needs to be nerfed it could always be a ship specific cannon, or even a unique upgrade, I mean its not like we here about a lot of that kind of thing anyway

The ships that would fear a shield canceling mechanic are : x-wing, e-wing, b-wing, defender.

So if you go against rebels, it would be really good. But if you go against imps, it would be almost useless.

this cannon would also make the Tie Phantom utterly terrified, but on the other hand the rebals have things like ion tuurent that work really well aganst imp ships and are less effective aginst rebel ships

The ships that would fear a shield canceling mechanic are : x-wing, e-wing, b-wing, defender.

So if you go against rebels, it would be really good. But if you go against imps, it would be almost useless.

this cannon would also make the Tie Phantom utterly terrified, but on the other hand the rebals have things like ion tuurent that work really well aganst imp ships and are less effective aginst rebel ships

I would actually say that Ion weapons are more effective against Rebel ships, since most of the Imperial ships have either Barrel Roll and/or Boost.

When you take a look at it shields are nothing more than 1 hit point. You just can't flip a card face up and have an effect. Most face up cards only do 1 damage anyways and many face up cards have no effect to certain pilots or are quickly resolved (flip back face down) the following turn. It takes the same # of hits to kill a B-wing as it does to kill a Y-wing. Same for Defenders and bombers as well for E-wing and X-wings.

As of now only the Imperials have measures to deal directly a face up damage with proton bombs and Vader Crew. So there is some shield ignoring power for Imperials to bust shielded rebel ships. ...

There is not a lot of difference between removing a shield token with a [hit] or [crit] and being dealt a face-down card but there is a difference. Having that card means there are things that can turn it face up and that is where the difference is. There are also more ways to get new shield tokens then there are to reliably discard damage cards.

I also want to point out the Vader crewman DOES NOT directly deal face up damage cards. Vader will cause the target to suffer a [crit] but that still has deal with Shields fist.

As an Imp player, I completely, totally, and unbaisedly support this idea(but seriously shields op).

Gratified to find everyone has interest in this idea as well.

After considering what we've heard from everyone, it would seem that the best way to make an option that is both balanced and worthwhile in both tournament and Fly Casual situations a low-cost, low-damage option would be best:

Proton Cannon: Firepower 3, Range 1-2, 5 points, "If this attack hits, the attacker may select a single BAM or KAPOW! result to be applied directly to the target's hull, ignoring all shields."

Cheaper than an HLC, but still pretty much 5 wasted points if your opponent doesn't have shields. Perhaps extending the range out to 1-3 so as to provide a minor benefit (denying opponent the agility bonus at long range)?

Hmm, just had an idea for something along the lines of "After rolling attack dice, you may remove <Crit> results. For each removed this way, choose another <Hit> or <Crit>. These results may ignore the defender's shields."

Allows you to have a weapon that's actually useful for its points in a normal fight (maybe it confers a reroll or something, too) and you can dynamically reduce it's damage to increase it's shield penetration. If you're rolling 4 dice, your maximum through-shields damage is 2. And the defender can still evade it. Heck, maybe this isn't even a Cannon upgrade. It could be a modification, "Modulating Lasers" or something, that applies to any attacks you make.