I don't know. I like the idea of it, but I'm not sure it's going to succeed over the long term. If you really want an Imperial stress-thingy, what's the advantage of running Flechette Torpedoes over Flechette Cannon?

Kath Scarlet (38)

Calculation (1)

Flechette Cannon (2)

Tactician (2)

Total: 43

As long as you can pick up a focus token, that's guaranteed 2 stress on attacks from the front arc, and 1-2 stress in the rear arc. And you can do it as often as you like, rather than the one-shot Flechette Torpedoes method.

ETA: I guess Torpedoes + Guidance Chips aren't range-restricted the way Tactician is, which is a definite advantage.

I'm not sure it has to succeed in the long term. The stress aspect needs to do certain things. It has to be a major threat to a certain kind of ship, and have some utility against all the other ships. The flechette cannon probably assigns more stress over the course of the game, but the point of the Torp/Chip combo on Kath is that it is pretty good at netting your the double stress on the targets that you care about.

Flechette Cannon has to hit, and it doesn't work if someone already has a stress. So basically worthless against the like of Corran and Fel. The torp just works. It is also a legitimately damaging attack when you're packing Guidance Chips (or it will do a second stress). Against big 5+ hull ships, it's a shot you can keep to just drive a crit home instead of using your primary. Against lighter, <5 hull ships you can at least use it to stress them to prevent K-turning for a turn, and to have an attack at least as good as your primary attack. Against high defense ships that really have a hard time affording a hit (maybe a crit if they have no shields), the torp is as good as 2 stress, which is crippling in its own right. The nice thing is that Chips work on any die, so say you're shooting at Corran or Poe who can take a crit on his shields, if you get 0 or 1 hit, you convert a die to a crit and hope the greens turn up at least one evade to block it and generate another stress. If you get 2 or 3 hits, you use Chips to convert up to 3 hits with at least one crit, and at least bleed some tokens.

Finally, the build I have suggested, at least with VI, is basically a 2-point investment for the stress mechanics, and using those stress mechanics doesn't really reduce your damage. It's a lot of cards, but its cheap and flexible and doesn't stop the Firespray from just being a bruiser.