Nice, thanks for doing the legwork for everybody on this!

So unless my math is off (I'm not particularly good at statistics), the average damage of 5 red 3 blue is more or less the same with or without Leading Shots. Because while LS definitely improves the average damage of the reds (from .75 damage per die to right around 1 damage per die), you have to give up a die to do it. So the overall damage is a little bit higher (7.16 with 2 blue hits vs. 6.75 with 3 blue hits), but since we are dealing with discrete values, with rounding the damage becomes...the same: 7 damage with 0 accuracies, 6 damage with 1 accuracy, etc. Of course, LS is 1 point cheaper, and gives some nice insurance against poor dice, so it is definitely worth taking.

In this case i would say that SW7 may end up being a better upgrade and the reason is Defence Scramblers.

depends, right?

the appeal of SW-7 on the Winged Turd specifically is that it has a wealth of options to ignore/mitigate defense tokens that can make rolling natural accuracies redundant (or, if the accuracy would be more helpful, you can simply not use it for a turn) which becomes doubly the case if you run into a lot of ECM

of course, the Avenger has a similar appeal albeit perhaps more difficult to enable (need to wait for exhausted tokens). Might just be that the ISD-2 gets really expensive really quickly while the winged turd, when loaded with upgrades, comes out to about the same cost as a naked ISD-2, but the lack of SW-7's popularity makes me skeptical

for example, intel officer +SW-7 seems pretty stellar as an attack against a fresh ship, but it doesn't seem to be a particularly popular

now, if we're crossing over to the Battle Cruiser variant, I think you'll auto-include leading shots by virtue of there being more red dice in need of re-rolling

not sure if it'll be worth the points, but the Battle Cruiser packing spinals + gunnery + leading shots is 123 for 5 reds out the front, which is at least intriguing .X-17s and a medical team round to an OCD fulfilling 130 points

We'll see. I expect to see a significant use of Lando/Defence Scramblers at least initially in Wave 4 meta and SW7 is a good counter to both.

You can run LS through a Monte Carlo simulator and see what the average damage comes out to

Basic value without leading shots (4 red, 3 blue): 5.25

Situation 1: You don't care about accuracies at all and can therefore spend to reroll them: 6.18

Situation 2: You want one accuracy, and therefore won't spend it if its your only one: 5.72

Situation 3: You want two accuracies: 5.53

Basic value without leading shots, but with SA (5 red, 3 blue): 6.00

Situation 1 as above: 7.16

Situation 2 as above: 6.68

Situation 3 as above: 6.45

Use that however you like. A Monte Carlo simulation is going to get close to the true averages because it rolls the dice at least 50,000 times and compares results, but a small amount of variance is expect (e.g. 6.246 instead of 6.25 exactly).

If Defense Scramblers make that much of an appearance in the meta, then certainly I agree with PT106, that SW-7 is going to get much more mileage. If fact, you'd probably want LS on the Battlecruiser variant and SW-7 on the Starcruiser just to maximize the benefit you're getting out of each.

What happen when spinal armment get adds to imp ships.

What happen when spinal armment get adds to imp ships.

Average damage increases by.75 in the front and rear firing arcs.