I may have inadvertently created a new (or remixed) damage mechanic, I just have no idea how to figure out probabilities to make sure it's balanced. Maybe one o' yous has an inkling.

Essentially, an attacker fires whichever guns they have built and have the resources to fire. Can be anywhere from 1 to 5 guns.

In playtesting so far, the defender would then roll dice, and add up the various hits, half-hits, or what have you. Worked smoothly, but dice are...a little bit *too* random for me.

So, here's the new system, as simply as I can put it:
There are 4 categories of parts you can add to your ship. Right now let's just keep them as numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4.
So I'm gonna make cards that equally distribute symbols representing those part types.
So, 24 cards. 6 cards affect part type 1, 6 affect part type 2, etc.
Each of these cards also has a setback printed on it, like "extra electrical damage" or "sacrifice one resource" for funsies.

In an attack, the attacker fires whatever guns they want, and the defender draws the equivalent number of cards from the "damage deck." And calculate damage like so:

Any single card labeled with 1, 2, 3, or 4 causes damage to *that type* of part *if* the target ship has one. Otherwise, it's a miss.

Any pair of 1's, 2's, etc is actually a bit better for the defender: they pick one to keep depending on the printed setback they hate less. The other one is discarded.

Any triplets are Critical Hits. The defender has to keep two of them.

Over the course of the game, the number of cards you have represents how many times you've been hit: so if you're playing a 10 HP game, collecting 10 cards means you're dead.

this means a couple of cool things:
1) Early in the game, critical hits are unlikely to happen, because it will take a while to build and fire 3 guns, the minimum to get a critical hit.
2) the idea of smaller ships being harder to hit is built in to the system: smaller ships are less likely to have the parts dictated for damage by single cards.
3) This gives a little bit of strategy that dice do not have, since players have opportunities to "pick" which damage they have to deal with.
4) Even more strategy can worked in since the probabilities will shift a little as each type of card is removed from the deck into each player's hand. Players could use this knowledge to their advantage.

So basically, instead of using dice (or even simple cards labeled with the equivalent of dice odds), particular damage is determined more by combos of symbols on the cards, yielding some very interesting results. I just have no idea how to balance those probabilities.

...does this make any sense as printed?