Sorry if this has been posted before. I've had a look in the forums and there are two different posts which has left me confused. What I want to know is can Dutch provide a target lock to another ship if that ship has no viable targets in target lock range?

In a recent game, a rookie X-Wing was flying behind Dutch, within range 2. For his action, Dutch target locked a TIE Fighter in front of him who was at range 3 and I wanted to give the X-WIng a target lock on the same TIE FIghter, even though the TIE fighter is well out of range.

No, you can't perform a target lock if nothing is in range.

Thanks for the reply MM. But here is my take on Dutch's ability. Allowing a friendly ship to obtain a target lock if they are in the 1-2 range of Dutch for me, is Dutch transmitting the targetting coordinates to the friendly ship after he has obtained target lock. I've only ever used Dutch's ability to give a target lock on the enemy ship he has already targetted.

With this in mind, would it change your view? Or anyone else for that matter?

Using theme to interpret rules often leads to incorrect interpretations of the rules.

Here's a theme interpretation that matches the rules: Dutch has upgraded his Y's targeting computer so that it can run multiple target locks at once. Since his weapons can only lock onto a single target, he uses the computer to acquire a viable lock for a target one of his buddies can go after, and feeds it to their computer. His computer uses the coordinates of the friendly fighter as well as the enemy fighter to compute the lock, so the enemy fighter must be close enough to the friendly for a lock to happen.