I cant get space fighting down at all, I understand how manuvers work, b ut shooting and the way you damage a ship doesnt make sense at all.

ex:

sunhammer lance dmg is 1d10+3, why does it also say strength 1?

what does crit rating 3 actually do?

Void shields do what exactly?

how is it determined what componet takes the damage?

Thanx for taking the time to s'plain this

Strength 1 means it can score exactly one hit that you roll damage dice for, no matter the number of successes. Note that Strength is seperate from Crit

CRIT is how many hits you need to score a critical hit on a ship. It's usually higher than the weapon's strength but isn't reliant on the weapon doing damage. However if your weapon doesn't damage the ship you only do one hull damage instead of rolling on the critical hit chart.

NOTE: Rolling under your BS (after modifiers) is always one hit. Macrocannons score one extra hit per DOS, lances 1 extra hit per 3 DOS. There are a few exceptions and they are listed in their entries. Damage from each shot is combined together, and added up.

EXAMPLE: A lance with Strength 1, crit 3 , and damage 1d10+3 rolls a hit, plus 8 degrees of sucess (for a total of 9). It has scored a critical hit as that would be enough sucesses to do a crit. However it still only rolls 1d10+3 for damage as it can only score one hit. Were it Strength 2 it would roll 2d10+6 so long as it rolled 6 sucesses (one sucessful BS roll, plus 5 DOS).

VOID shields: These reduce the number of hits from EACH attacker in a turn. So if you have one void shield, it'll stop the first hit from everyone shooting at you, unless a critical hit takes it out. Worth mentioning these hits still count for the purposes of a critical, even though they aren't added to damage.

COMPONENT damage: Is usually chosen by the attacker based on what they know the ship to be using. The focused augury and critical hit rules explain this a bit better.

Basically unless they spend time scanning the ship they'll know if it has shields (from shooting it), weapons (which are shooting at them), and the engines. To figure out what else they might be able to blow up they'd have to scan it to locate its life support, any specialty components, and so on.

If you need a random determination. Just figure out what components there are and roll a D10 or two. Get number and count from 1 (if using 1d10) or 2 (if using 2d10) and that's what took a hit. At least that's how I've done it.

Also worth noting that Torpedoes, bombers, and nova cannons all have different rules for hits, and crits. Consult battlefleet Koronus for those.

Crit is not the number of hits needed to get a Critical Hit, it's the number of Degrees of Success needed to get a Critical Hit.

All of this is laid out over pages 219-221 of the core rulebook.

That's what I get for rushing out an answer entirely from memory in between work loads. XD

I stand corrected on the matter of criticals

MILLANDSON said:

Actually, it's the number of "successes" needed to get a critical hit...

Has that ever been officially clarified?

Please allow me to I try to answer some of the questions.

STRENGTH: the maximum number of hits

CRIT RATING: the number of Degree of Success (or Successes, depends on the GM currently) needed to do Critical Hits (table available)

Void Shields absorb HIT from a source. Usually only one HIT, but some Cruiser or Archeotech can increase it.

Component that can be damaged is component known by the attacker (unless defender have some device that negates this). Component can be known by doing Focused Augury (I Think) or if that component has been used.

Hope this helpes, and please correct me if I'm wrong.

Double checked last night. Page 219 says criticals are calculated by sucesses. So my original post does seem to be accurate. 0.0