Ordnances Tubes and Weapon Damaged

By Wildhorn, in X-Wing Rules Questions

Weapon Damaged
Place 1 of the Hardpoint Upgrade cards equipped to this section under this card. You cannot use that Upgrade card while this card is faceup.
Energy: Spend 3 energy to flip this card facedown.

ordnance-tubes.png

So yesterday I played an Epic game and this case of figure happened.

My Raider has Ordnance Tubes equiped with Cluster Missiles and it receive a critical hit dealing the Weapon Damaged card. What happens?

Because it says to put an Hardpoint Upgrade card under the card, but it doesn't have any Hardpoint Upgrade cards equiped, only Missiles Upgrade cards.

We rolled the decision and I kept my missile, but it would be nice to have a sure answer to it.

Does the damage card have the hard point icon on it?

So the real question is if it still is considered to be a hardpoint. Id say no since the ordnance card you are using dossnt have the hardpoint icon.

Ordnance Tubes states that you treat hardpoint upgrade slots as missile / torp upgrade slots - not the other way round - so they aren't hardpoints any more

This will probably be another faq entry. My thought would be one of the ordnance tubes would be out of action since you're replacing one or more of the gun mounts with tubes. The tubes still have the same arc of the hard point they replaced. The term "hard point" has historically been used to identify the location of a bomb or missile mounting location.

But in the game, it's a specific type of upgrade and upgrade card. The upgrade symbol has been replaced by a missile or torpedo symbol thanks to Ordnance Tubes and no longer exists for game purposes. More importantly, any missile or torpedo upgrade cards assigned to that section are unequivocally not Hardpoint Upgrade cards. I wouldn't be surprised if FFG changes it so that Weapon Damaged works against them, but it's not supported by the text on the damage card.

While I have every reason to believe that the card could recieve a FAQ down the road, as written, the crit would simply have no effect. After all, the card would also have no effect if the section had no hardpoint or missile upgrade (which people in my Meta have tried on corvettes in order to have a bigger escort).

It may be important not to take anything for granted as far as that critical hit card is concerned. As of this moment, huge ships using ordnance have a severe range penalty early in the battle. Having that critical hit not affect ordnance based upgrades could be an oversight, but it could also be a balance choice by the devs. Only a (much needed) huge ship rule update could tell us more (or a question submitted to the devs).