How to Think About Gunnery and Boarding?

One thing I've realized is that there's a lot of "internal complexity" to gunnery and boarding, to the point that you can't abstract over them and just think about ship positioning or whatever. It matters what guns you have, and what you do with them; it matters what guns enemies have, and what they do with them.

Similarly, at the personal combat level, your personal equipment and FPS play matter more than they do in something like Overwatch or Battlefield. Short sightlines and low TTK mean that surprise and equipment matter more than numbers.

So, currently I'm trying to approach the game from those angles first, and synthesize into something manageable I can teach to my friends. What follows is a dog's dinner of individual pieces. I'd appreciate any additions or synthesis.

- it's worth a lot to shoot down macros - is scatter good for shooting enemy boarders on approach? (What *is* scatter good for?) - drill charge, Ion, and Impact Can seem like very low-risk approaches to boarding, letting you do stuff from outside (particularly breaking windows and then shooting inside) - even if you have better guns, better gunners, and better piloting, it can make sense to approach or send Adrian/turbines, because boarding can be so impactful (potentially giving high-leverage access to enemy action economy by killing crew, and shield/engine controls) - for similar reasons, even if you would *eventually* win a fight from a distance, it can still make sense to approach to give your gunners the opportunity to target specific systems - ...however, both the above expose you to being boarded yourself, which can be very (badly) impactful, mines, laser rams, and plasma beams - often times people ask "who will pilot?" I think this is backwards. Anyone can pilot, it doesn't require specialized equipment or anything. The more important (as in *impactful*) question is, who will board, who will defend against boarders, and how? Random teams of sweats that roll up in a Scout and board you to death are not succeeding at this because of their superior piloting! - as I think about it, you can almost think of boarders as another ship weapon, with that weapon's "effective range" being determined by turbines and the presence/absence of Adrian/Kay/Mophs (all of whom have abnormal movement profiles), and the "payload" of said weapon being their equipment (and a few prospector-specific abilities like Ion, Kay, and Mophs). - boarder defense seems a little more complicated, as sometimes it's best done from inside the ship, but sometimes best done from the outside (privateer comes to mind). However, the one thing I'm certain of is that boarder defense is not a "second-class citizen" --- the penalty you pay is just really high if you don't have a plan - the power of boarding, laser rams, plasma beams, and mines mean that combat changes dramatically at certain range breakpoints.

I'll end here, as I've been off-and-on writing this for a few days. I'd be particularly interested in what people have to say about gunnery's place in all this.