A couple of questions,

1) How do it only work on friendly bombs? I guess when they see enemy bombs they panic and eject the plating

2) How come it is not available to all factions, it would have been the bomb fix we are looking for. Interceptor could come back to the game, It's a 1 pt gamble, that you might never get to use it.

That is all

The card is there to blunt the damage from flinging bombs in front of you, since a large base can easily catch itself in the blast radius of a trajectory simulator bomb. It was never intended as a counter for bombs, which probably would have needed more playtesting than film tie-in ships tend to get.

Yeah, I agree totally.

The only problem is that it is in a 40 dollar ship...which honestly would make it more likely to include a fix for a 15 dollar ship.

5 minutes ago, eagletsi111 said:

2) How come it is not available to all factions

Because it's crap?

The B/SF-17 is designed to handle bombs from its trajectory simulator. It's onboard computers are able to anticipate where it's going to go, and the impact is usually absorbed by the plating.

It's less able to make those predictions for enemy bombs dropped directly on top if it.

because, if it worked against enemy bombs, itd be a counter-upgrade that is utterly useless against anything but bombs. this is **** awful game design at its finest, which would only skew your matchups rather than give you any sort of additional gameplay interaction (ie, matchup rock-paper-scissors). Even autothrusters gets general use out of its "beyond range 2" clause

as for why it doesn't effect enemy bombs, it's because that'd be broken as **** if it were widely available. might as well just ditch the entire bomb mechanic altogether (which I know some sillies are in favor of, but nothing should go before turrets)

granted, the resistance bomber is a giant piece of crap so it could ignore all bombs just fine...or not have a random discard upgrade...

It's a cheap and quick upgrade to the bomber, so that Crimson Specialist can do his thing, or just you can do a maneuver besides 0■ or 1 ↰ ↱ and not have to worry about hitting your own bomb. Making it applicable to all ships would surely mean it should cost more (since now you have to take into account all the ships which can ignore bombs) and like FGD said should probably do something besides just tell bombs to **** off because otherwise you're throwing away points on any match the opponent doesn't use bombs. Since the B/SF-17 is only good at bombing, you can assume you will use it to bomb, so taking the plating can be a pretty simple add-on.

I understand your inquiry @eagletsi111, but that's not my inquiry I had after looking over the beast. My thought was, why design a ship that releases bombs that damage itself in the first place, isn't that madness? Scum I see doing that, but the Rebellion who in cannon have few ships on which to rely in the conflict? No....I don't get it.

4 minutes ago, clanofwolves said:

I understand your inquiry @eagletsi111, but that's not my inquiry I had after looking over the beast. My thought was, why design a ship that releases bombs that damage itself in the first place, isn't that madness? Scum I see doing that, but the Rebellion who in cannon have few ships on which to rely in the conflict? No....I don't get it.

%3

Are they not always against the wall and needing to do what it takes to win in desperate gambits?

Scum is certainly more likely to be “uncaring”, but the Rebellion (and Resistance) certainly can’t say no to Martyrdom where required...

6 minutes ago, clanofwolves said:

I understand your inquiry @eagletsi111, but that's not my inquiry I had after looking over the beast. My thought was, why design a ship that releases bombs that damage itself in the first place, isn't that madness? Scum I see doing that, but the Rebellion who in cannon have few ships on which to rely in the conflict? No....I don't get it.

%3

I can invite you to look at things differently: if it had been a scum ship then there would not have been any deflective plating at all.

As it currently stands, these bombers can make a run at the enemy as follows:

- First round of bombing: they are certain that they will not take any damage.

- Second round of bombing: they have a 50% chance of taking damage (if the deflective plating held or not)

- Third and forth round: assuming that they passed the enemy, they are dropping bombs from the back instead and using their turrets.

So they can really only get damaged on one round and even if they do, these beasts have a lot of hull and shield to get through. Making a run at a capital ship is going to be risky either way, but mostly from the return fire and not from the bombs.

For the same reason TLT and Autothrusters weren't in the same pack?