[ACTA:SF] Scouting clarification question

[John Wall]

I played a game with Kzinti scouts against the Federation yesterday and came up with an interesting issue which needs clarifying.

I experimented with using jamming directed against the Federation drone system, to give myself the maximum chance of successful drone bombardment. This lead to the point of contention.

Federation ships can switch their drones to anti drone mode, which is a trait, and its not clear exactly how the two systems interact.

I think it works as follows:

1. I jam the target ships drone system. Per the wording of the rules, that removes two AD from the system. So for a typical Federation ship that reduces the Drone system to having 0 attack dice.

2. When I fire Drones at the target ship (and not before), he elects to switch to Anti drone mode. Per those rules, he then gets the AD trait with the number of AD to the same number as the drone system.

The argument boils down to this: what rating does the anti-drone trait now have? Does it take the original drone system rating or does it take the current rating of 0? By the wording, I think it takes the rating of 0 due to the order in which the rules are applied.

This is further complicated by the timing of the scouting function. As these occur in the attack phase, you can have the situation of having a federation ship attacking first, declaring it will use its drones in AD mode and acquiring a trait which cannot be affected by jamming.

It has also been argued that the rule only applies when the weapon systems fire, but that rule only applies when a friendly ship is jammed and is attacked by an enemy ship, which I was also doing using another scouting channel.

So, what is the correct ruling? In the end we steered clear of the rules and assumed I just reduced defensive phasers by 2AD.

 

[Skullduggery]

I think you are right. The fed add has the same score as the firing rack. If scouting reduces it to 0 it has 0 dice vs incoming drones. That's the way we have been playing it.

 

[Rambler]

The Jamming only effects Drone Racks use offensively. It would have no effect on the Drone Racks being switched over to b used Defensively as a Ships Trait.

Jamming does not stop a Weapon System from firing it simply causes 2AD fired Offensively to miss. Fed Drone Racks fire on the incoming drones when they are at point blank range. There is not enough flight time involved to spoof the Anti Drones Targeting.

 

[John Wall]

That's the issue though, the rules don't use that wording (although maybe they should!) when they discuss jamming.

If jamming an enemy vessel the wording is

"remove two attack dice from any one weapon system"

which is very different to

"remove two attack dice fired offensively from any one weapon system"

The second also means you cannot suppress defensive phaser fire. For Kzinti in particular this becomes a significant issue as they rely on drones to do the majority of their damage and suppressing the enemys ability to defeat drones would be a key tactic.

Note that the alternative use of jamming (targeting a friendly ship) does specifically prevent two dice of attack dice used to attack the jammed (friendly) ship, as otherwise the jamming would be useless!

 

[Drummer]

I can only speak in regards to the mechanics of Star Fleet Battles here, but ADDs are not affected by electronic warfare. The idea is that these warp-speed direct-fire fired "rockets" burst on the way to the target, scattering the area with kinetic pellets that drones/shuttles/fighters run into as they cross paths. There's no way to "jam" this. Think shotgun blast or grapeshot.

 

[John Wall]

Thanks Drummer, its been far too long since I played original SFB so I couldn't remember the way it was handled in that game.

It did occur to me this morning that any ruling on jamming also affects phasers under the "close blast doors" action, as they could be firing up to 18" away. It seems to me that its reasonable that that sort of fire could be suppressed by jamming.

Also, if the rule said that defensive fire was still possible under jamming, it would be pointless to ever jam phasers, as the target enemy ship would just say "okay, i'll hold those phasers back for defensive fire and use them against your drones". Which means that the jamming was largely pointless as most races have either drones or plasma, which the phasers could then be used against.