I have been playing and this question keeps coming up. When a vehicle weapon is used ageist a player with ether of the talents, is the damage reduction from the talent apply before or after converting from Vehicle to Personal?

If the damage is returned with a improved version of the talent, is it Vehicle or Personal scale damage?

After. The damage isn’t so much converted as it is just a larger value. You might be able to contradict me in the rules, but this is still the way I would play it. In other words, “No. Your lightsaber is not deflecting 60 points of damage from that turbo laser.” Of course, hopefully your players aren’t regularly getting shot by turbo lasers.

per raw vehicle scale weapons cant be reflected. But media implies it can. Shrug.

Daeglen, can I get a page number please.

It would be in the long description for reflect.

@Daeglan The reflect talent doesn't say that though.

"Reflect - Force talent. When the character suffers a hit from a Ranged (light), Ranged (heavy), OR Gunnery combat check, and after damage is calculated (but before soak is applied, so immediately after step 3 of Perform a Combat Check, page 210), he may take the Reflect incidental. He suffers 3 strain and reduces the damage dealt by that hit by a number equal to 2 plus ranks in Reflect. This talent may only be used once per hit and when the character is wielding a Lightsaber weapon."

So where are you getting the information that "vehicle scale weapons can't be reflected"? It's not in the long description. Improved Reflect, however, does add this, "The ranged attack's hit must be one that is able to be reflected and redirected ( GENERALLY only blaster weapons or other energy attacks fall into this category; anything else is SUBJECT TO GM OVERSIGHT )."

So by RAW, you could use Reflect against planetary scale weapons, since they're made with a Gunnery check.

However, the problem comes in that such weapons have their base damage value multiplied by 10 when attacking a character-scale target, with the multiplication taking place prior to the damage being applied. By the wording on Reflect as provided by Ebocco, Reflect kicks in after the damage is calculated, which means it occurs after the damage multiplication.

So yes, your PC could use their Reflect talent against a hit from a light laser cannon... but the damage is going to be so ridiculously above your PC's wound threshold that it's not going to matter.

As for what we've seen on screen of Jedi deflecting blaster fire from vehicles, a lot of that is probably just narrative flair (though Luke deflecting the blaster fire from speeder bike in RotJ is handwaved by FFG by having the speeder's blaster deal its damage at a personal scale). Given how calculating the difficulty for ranged attacks for planetary-scale weapons works (smaller targets are harder to hit regardless of range), it can be pretty safely said that the Jedi types made use of other defensive abilities (such as Sense's defense control upgrade or ranks in talents like Adversary or Dodge) to make the difficulty high enough that the attacker simply missed.

I've seen a house rule bandied about a few different places is to alter Reflect so that its effects take place prior to the damage multiplier when used against planetary-scale weapons. YMMV on whether it makes Jedi types too powerful for the table (especially if there's only one Jedi type PC in the group) since a few ranks of Reflect can mitigate the damage from weapons that generally turn human-scale targets into a fine mist.

3 hours ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

I've seen a house rule bandied about a few different places is to alter Reflect so that its effects take place prior to the damage multiplier when used against planetary-scale weapons. YMMV on whether it makes Jedi types too powerful for the table (especially if there's only one Jedi type PC in the group) since a few ranks of Reflect can mitigate the damage from weapons that generally turn human-scale targets into a fine mist.

This is something I've been thinking about, and I have a couple explanations for why that might "make sense" narratively, though I agree that it has... problems mechanically. Either way has problems, best solution is to not target your PCs with planetary-scale weaponry and to not let your PCs target your NPCs with planetary-scale weaponry (the latter is easier said than done).

We know that a combat check is not a single shot, and with a personal-scale weapon, you typically have a fairly high rate of fire and relatively tight groupings. So Reflect can be said to be deflecting some of the shots, while others manage to make it through the character's defenses.
Starship weaponry in Star Wars doesn't seem to have a particularly high rate of fire and, against personal-scale targets, not particularly tight groupings. When the character has fewer blasts to deflect, they are more likely to be able to completely deflect the attack. However, some shots may still partially penetrate their defenses, and that is extremely dangerous even when it only breaks through marginally.