Is coordinated assault in some other book that I'm unaware of? I was excited to get it, but it requires that I'm engaged with my allies to make it work. It has the caveat that for each rank in coordinated assault I can increase the range, but it's only on 1 tree that I'm aware of.

Only in the one, but there's more books coming.

In the mean time, make sure you know how big the engaged band is. Its often horribly underestimated.

If I am not mistaken, if you are in a wing formation you are considered engaged with your allies. AFB right now.

"The engaged status simply indicates that two things are enough to each other to directly interact with each other."

This suggest that an open comlink and access to a sensor station would be enough to coordinate an assault. As long as their is no jamming going on you should be able to coordinate a whole Wing.

The moment your com gets jammed you might be out of luck with coordinating an assault of star ships.

Anyone disagrees with this interpretation and if yes then why?

For general purposes of the Engaged range band, rather than what I feel thematically allows you to accomplish the effects of this talent, I stick with the definition(s):

Combat, against enemy: "Close enough so that, in one smooth and uninterrupted action, one character could physically assail another character."

With allies: "Relatively close together, so that easy conversation can pass and that, with little to no effort, one character could be at another's side if need be." - or: "Standing close enough so as to be considered a 'group'."

In combat, this is actually a surprising distance. I did some (very short) time as a fencing/rapier student and a lunge can carry you an impressive ways. I've spent much more time as a martial artist, and I've seen a number of ways to close distance that would fold into an attack action, rather than a maneuver... and that are deceptively smooth.

With allies, which is what this is about, I'd say that you have to be close enough that you could be touching them with an incidental's worth of movement... so, a few steps, at most? A yard or three? Or that you are standing close enough together so that if an outside party were to arrive, you'd be a "unit". No fanning out, no outliers: you look like the cast of people walking slow-motion though a large sci-fi door as the viewers look on and say "those are the heroes". Definitely enough that it's reasonable a grenade could hurt everyone involved.... though I have no real experience with actual grenades, so that's an iffy distance for me.

Also - and this may just be me - I might change my definition of "engaged" depending on the space. In a large encounter with a lot of open room, "engaged" allies might be spread out just a bit, although uniformly and still near-by. That same distance might be considered "short" in a small room where "engaged" could describe people shoulder-to-shoulder. That, however, would just be my attempt to add tactical interest to an encounter that happened to take place in a tight space, and it would require some other changes as well: grenades hurt everyone, medium range is a stretch even when things are made smaller, etc.

With space combat, as they said, that all goes out the window. "Engaged" doesn't even exist, and space combat requires a sort of.... narrative looseness to make any fun as-is, if you ask me, so I'd say a whole wing could be engaged.

I'm betting the reason it's Engaged is because of what it does and how it would affect vehicle combat.

Add Advantage equal to ranks in Leadership the next combat check means activating things like Linked (a common weapon feature on vehicles) becomes super easy.

Not to mention Critting is a pretty big deal in vehicle combat, and lots of advantage can make super-critting easier. A person gets an arm mangled and drops their blaster they can still pick up the blaster in the other hand. If you knock the lasers off a starfighter, it's essentially out of the encounter.

Yeah, being able to have everyone open up with the four lasers on your X-wings is fun, but remember talents like that have to work both directions. Would stink to be on the receiving end of some TIE Defenders quad-linking you, or to go out in a repulsor tank only to get your engine KOed in the first hit, and essentially become a bunker full of sitting ducks.

*scratch head* Is space close not technically the engaged equivalent on planetary scale? Which is the dog fighting distance, which is also known as knife-fighting.

A single advantage extra for a few guys is not such a big thing. But indeed, it works both ways, though your example with the repulsor tank makes already for an awesome scene, because it just means that someone has to spend the damage control action and fix the **** thing. It costs one whooping turn if your group has an astromech worth its money.

And ironically you just gave a 109-126 critical hits. Both of them are quite unlikely to proc on the first hit, no matter if a few enemies gain a single advantage extra or not.

By the way, it not "take advantages equal to leadership", it is "number of allies equal to Leadership gain one advantage"

*scratch head* Is space close not technically the engaged equivalent on planetary scale? Which is the dog fighting distance, which is also known as knife-fighting.

It is, but they are distinct things. So, they are equivalent in theme and the idea of being the closest possible range, but "engaged" is not "close"... I'm AFB and, like, pretty tired from being part-way through an overnight shift at work, but I'm sure the distinction is important somewhere. For Battle Meditation, mechanically, it sure is (though thematically I think it should work), and if I wanted to dig through the book I'm sure I could find more.

But... yeah, it's a weird concept. However "all the personal scale range-bands" are stated to fit into a single planetary range band, IIRC, which causes a raised eyebrow potentially but goes a long way to remind us that the scales are definitely different.

*scratch head* Is space close not technically the engaged equivalent on planetary scale? Which is the dog fighting distance, which is also known as knife-fighting.

It's the engaged equivalent at planetary scale, but it's not Engaged. Check the breakout box on people vs. vehicles and you'll see why it has to be different. The Blast quality, by definition only goes to Engaged Personal range, the box making a point of saying that vehicle weapons Blast gets to extend to Short Personal.

Why this matters is because if you make Close = Engaged, then Blast will have to extend to Close in vehicle combat. If you're only talking vehicles, this could possibly work, but since Vehicles and People have to be able to interact, Making Close = Engaged causes problems, since all Personal range bands exist within the Close Band. So Close = Engaged would cause vehicular Blast weapons to be able to hit everything to extreme range in personal combat.... One Proton torpedo wipes out an entire city... This scaling difference does cause some confusion as a lot of newer players assume that a Blast weapon like a Missile or Torpedo can activate on Vehicle scale, and say wipe a minion group of TIES, which it can't.

"But why do things like the Flak Cannon have Blast if they can't use it?"

Because they can, just in a different way. One of the other features of Blast is you can hit your Target on a miss with three Advantage. In the case of Missiles and Torpedoes you'll probably want to activate Guided instead for the same cost, but for something like a Flak cannon Blast 4 against a flimsy starfighter with an Armor of only 2 or 3, isn't bad.

By the way, it not "take advantages equal to leadership", it is "number of allies equal to Leadership gain one advantage"

I stand corrected on the details, but the rest remains. Crits and Linked are pretty big deals in vehicle combat. Linked applying more HT, the most predictable way to KO a vehicle, and Crits being less predictable, but more effective when stacked or combined with qualities like Vicious.

A single advantage extra for a few guys is not such a big thing. But indeed, it works both ways, though your example with the repulsor tank makes already for an awesome scene, because it just means that someone has to spend the damage control action and fix the **** thing. It costs one whooping turn if your group has an astromech worth its money.

And ironically you just gave a 109-126 critical hits. Both of them are quite unlikely to proc on the first hit, no matter if a few enemies gain a single advantage extra or not.

Not as unlikely as you think. Look at the crit chart and you'll see how things can get out of hand. If three players fire weapons, and are all able to Crit at least once each, the results are likely to generate some seriously debilitating results. In the example of the repulsor tank each hit has an increasing chance of inflicting strain, disabling a weapon, KOing the Engine or reducing the speed to low a vehicle can't maneuver, or any one of a number of debilitating effects. Sometimes this is good (if the players are dismounted and using missile tubes they need all the crits they can get) but when talking vehicle on vehicle it'll not only get silly, but open up some other details. It'll allow the offset of the Massive quality, which exists specifically because critting is so serious to capital ships. Linked becomes pretty serious too. Effectively doubling damage in vehicle combat is a serious issue, and linked is often flagged as one of the reasons Starfighter combat is so deadly.