Can a Beam PD target a ship?

[shalis (OP)]

Sorry if its been asked.  Long time player of VB6 but only a couple games in C#.  Its been awhile since i had played and recently resumed.

I seem to remember back in VB6 days sometimes using my AMMs for anti ship role in a pinch. .  although now that i'm typing this the possibility occurs to me that maybe i had multiple fire controls and switched between them. 

Currently i've been using a mix of 10cm lasers and AMMs for PD as beams are so much more effective now a days.  Anyways i'm digressing.  I have a scout ship with several 10cm turreted lasers with beam PD fire controls that just got jumped by a spoiler at point blank range, can i just verify that there is no way for me to use a Beam PD to target a ship and/or none of the PD modes include shooting at ships within range only missiles?

thanks for your time, and apologize if its a redundant question.

[Andrew]

No you cannot.
Beam fire controls can target any ship within their range. If you cannot target the ship shooting you, check that you have active sensors which are on , and that the Alien race are set to hostile.

[shalis (OP)]

Sorry, i probably wasn't clear.  the ship has beam fire controls set to single weapon and PD, so i'm guessing that your first answer applies and they cannot target ships.

It does have active sensors and the ship does show on target list.  I should have put a regular beam control in them to switch the lasers to in situations like these, oh well thats what Mk. II is for.  :)

Thank you Andrew.

[GrandNord]

If you are within range (accounting for enemy jammer and stealth), you have active sensors on and you have BFCs with weapons assigned you can target enemy ships.

Any weapon can be used as PD (with more or much less effectiveness depending on the weapon, turret speed, BFC speed and range and the reload rate), you just need to assign a PD behaviour to a BFC (right part of the combat tab of the naval organization window when you have a ship selected).

Since PD weapons are just normal weapons with assigned PD behaviours you can just assign an enemy target to a PD BFC and order the BFC to open fire as normal.

[Andrew]

Sorry, i probably wasn't clear.  the ship has beam fire controls set to single weapon and PD, so i'm guessing that your first answer applies and they cannot target ships.

It does have active sensors and the ship does show on target list.  I should have put a regular beam control in them to switch the lasers to in situations like these, oh well thats what Mk. II is for. 

Thank you Andrew.

Apparently I was not clear
Any Beam fire control can target any enemy ship in range . so you should be able to shoot at him, the pont defense settings have no bearing on your ability to shoot at ships

[Bremen]

There seems to be some confusion here. I think by "no you cannot" the first response meant "you cannot verify that it's impossible". Beam PD assigned to a fire control can fire on another ship just fine. CIWS can't fire on ships, but they're not assigned to a fire control.

None of the built in PD modes will target another ship, but if you have the fire control the beam PD is assigned to target another ship directly instead of using a fire mode, it should work.

[AlStar]

Anything that's attached to a fire control, has an active sensor lock, and is within the range of both the beam weapon and the fire control (accounting for any ECM/ECCM) can be used to shoot at anything.

The only caveat I can think of is that if you have a beam control that has a PD setting, and you use it to fire on an enemy ship, it will be unable to fire at any incoming missiles in that same 5 second tick (or however long your recharge rate is).