I keep seeing battle reports on YouTube where the players talk about shooting a torpedo from the Ghost's rear arc.

Did I miss a memo? I thought secondary weapons were from the front arc only, unless a pilot ability says otherwise (like Moralo Eval on the YV-666 or Outrider title on the YT-2400), or if it's a turret weapon.

It's a special rule for the Ghost that it can fire torpedoes out the rear arc even when there's no ship docked to it. It's in the rulebook that comes with the Ghost. You can also see there's a little torpedo icon on the rear arc of the Ghost's base.

It is specific to the special firing arc rules that come with the Ghost.

Thanks. I've never played with it, or against it so I had no idea. I've only read the stat block on squad list builders.

People don't tend to use it, because the ghost already throws 4 dice with its primary, so a torpedo is kind of redundant and more difficult to use.

You'll pretty much only ever see it on a VCX without the shuttle and without a TLT. It pairs fairly well with an autoblaster but it's such a specific build that it's extremely uncommon.

Yeah, It's a weird mechanic that's only appeared once. The Ghost doesn't have a normal auxiliary arc, it has a "special firing arc," which normally can only be used to fire the secondary weapon printed in the arc (torpedoes in this case). The Phantom title enables the ghost to make primary weapon attacks out of it's special arc as well.

I posted a battle report recently in which I faced an opponent who did this. I've received numerous questions about it too. Probably confused a ton of people. Especially anyone who has recently started and hasn't picked up a Ghost yet.

As to why the Ghost has this capability despite never displaying it onscreen... My best guess is that playtesters found it confusing for the Ghost to have an absolutely useless firing arc when it doesn't have a docked phantom, so FFG gave the arc a relatively minor use that could be fun but generally wouldn't increase the power of what they probably suspected was going to be a strong ship.

I think it's more a concept of it needing to have a rear firing arc due to the docked phantom - but if they simply gave it the "Auxiliary" arc, it may have been unbalanced. For starters there are cards that give a bonus to an Auxiliary Arc, and also there needed to be a way to prevent it from shooting that way after the phantom departs, and if it was called an Auxiliary arc, the rules would allow it to keep shooting.

41 minutes ago, Crabbok said:

I think it's more a concept of it needing to have a rear firing arc due to the docked phantom - but if they simply gave it the "Auxiliary" arc, it may have been unbalanced. For starters there are cards that give a bonus to an Auxiliary Arc, and also there needed to be a way to prevent it from shooting that way after the phantom departs, and if it was called an Auxiliary arc, the rules would allow it to keep shooting.

Sure, that's why the arc needed to exist- I'm saying I suspect the torpedo thing was added because playtesters got confused when it didn't do anything normally.