I'm curious, how many people would equip a secondary weapon whose only effect would be to assign a stress? If such a weapon existed, how would you price it, rate its attack, or modify it? Perhaps adding 1 damage like an ion cannon hit would be acceptable but I'm mostly wondering how feasible a primarily stress giving weapon would be.

Slicer Tools from the Reb Transport is what got me thinking [spend energy to assign damage to stressed enemy fighters]. I imagine a 'stressing secondary' would be used as a kind of action denial system, the more efficient version of hitting a stressed ship with an ion cannon.

I would build a stress-weapon in multiples, particularly if it assigned damage as well.

Such a weapon would greatly strengthen slow moving ships that then wouldn't have to worry about their limited movement dial so much since the enemy would have to move more predictably to keep shedding the incurred stress.

It would drastically change the balance of the game. Currently you only get stress by things you do and by unlucky crits. Slicer tools would break this so hard; doesn't the transport already have a stress inducing upgrade?

Being able to cause stress on top of Ion tokens would be quite damaging since there would be no way to barrel roll or boost away to prevent you from running off the board.