Hey, so, I'm having trouble understanding how you determine a Critical Hit during void combat. What I've got so far:

- if the weapon's Crit Rating is met but all the damage is absorbed by Armour, the target loses 1 point of Hull Integrity and you roll 1d5 on the Critical Hits table;

- if the ship is Crippled and you do damage exceeding the target's Armour, the Critical Hit result is the amount you exceed it by;

but what about if it isn't Crippled and you do exceed their Armour? Is it the damage dealt or a 1d5 roll or something else entirely?

In the example given, where a lance does 9 points of Hull Integrity damage, the player rolls a d5, but that means it's impossible to, say, get a lucky hit on the target's bridge even if you do 40 points of HI damage in one go.

Examples:

Ship has 60 HI & 3 AP (cos Mathhammer), gets Critted but takes no damage = 59 HI and 1d5 roll on the Crit table.

Ship has 0 HI & 3 AP, takes 10 damage = 7 on the Crit table.

BUT

Ship has 60 HI & 3 AP, takes 10 damage = 53 HI and... 1d5 on the Crit table again?

That means that you can ONLY get a result of Surly Techsprites or Decapitation once the ship is already Crippled - which just feels weird.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Having re-read the section on Criticals I realise I was parsing it wrong; the text reads "If the shot does not do any damage to Hull Integrity, inflict 1 automatic point of damage. Then roll 1d5 on the Critical Hit chart and apply the result to the target." I thought the "Then roll 1d5..." was still referring to "If the shot does not do any damage..." but I see that it's describing the standard Crit procedure.

Nothing to see here, move along.

If you can get a Decapitation at full strength, then it becomes even easier under base rules for starship combat to end in the first round. The 7+ Criticals basically kill (or should kill) a ship. I made that mistake in my first void combat, and the first macrocannon salvo rolled Surly Techsprites, which proceeded to shut down almost every component on the enemy ship. They were still in otherwise good shape, but the ship was then torn apart by lance and macrocannons next round since Shields were hit.