Sixth Sense is a general clusterfuck that needs a rewrite. Alot of people play it that way as discussed, because if you take it RAW suddenly the Sixth Sense guy can shoot through a building at people spec firing at him which just doesn't make any sense at all. If your local group wants to play it RAW by all means do so nobody's your boss here, just keep in mind what you're opening up to here.
If it helps, @HellLois ruled against that particular possibility here: https://forum.corvusbelli.com/threads/solved-jammer-total-cover.23474/ can a ssl2 trooper respond to a speculative fire attack by shooting despite intervening total cover. No, it ignors LoF as for orientation/smoke purposes, not when there's a wall or SS2 guy's ally in a way. What bothers me about that ruling is the quoted answer mentions Smoke.
That answer was about Jammers specifically, which don't need LOF because they're Jammers. Doesn't really help.
That question wasn't about Jammers. If it was, the answer would have been yes. If you can use a Jammer to shoot in the active turn through total cover, you can ARO through total cover. I'm fairly certain that second question was specific to SS ignoring LoF. And if SS can ignore Zero Visibility Zones, it should be able to ignore other visibility MODs such as ODD or CH. Unless of course @HellLois didn't consider that when quoting the answer. Which I'm completely fine with, a lot of stuff to keep straight in Infinity. But I still need answers to play this game properly.
Also the fact that @HellLois said you couldn't use it to shoot through allies is strange - allies block LoF but aren't total cover, same situation as smoke.
Both are instances of total cover: Requirements For a trooper to be in Total Cover, one of these two must be true: The pieces of scenery completely obstructs the attacking enemy's LoF. The attacking enemy does not have LoF to the trooper. Either smoke or a friendly trooper would be sufficient to satisfy the second point. I think the real outlier in what Helllois quoted was Eciu's claim that Sixth Sense lets you see through smoke, the rule is a lot neater if you just don't factor that and consider it purely a temporary 360 visor.
@Spleen By that logic smoke grenades would provide total cover as well, and we know they don't because things like template weapons still propagate through them (and troopers). Whereas total cover stops template weapons. What you're missing is that earlier in the same section it says that cover can only be provided by terrain.
It makes a lot of references to terrain but it's hardly explicit that that's the only way to have total cover. Also, the argument that total cover can only come from scenery would reduce that second bullet point to completely meaningless, which I'm always hesitant to do. Someone thought it needed to be written in for a reason.
There's also the issue of LOF blocked by friendly Troopers. Personally, I think Infinity plays easier if you consider 3 separate concepts: Facing: the standard 180 degree visual arc. Line of Sight: what a particular Trooper can see based on facing, obstructing terrain and ZVZs (3mm minimum concept applies, but LOS is not necessarily mutual) Line of Fire: an unobstructed line between two points, irrespective of LOS (3mm minimumand mutual LOF concepts apply) ignoring facing and ZVZs. Total Cover: blocks LOS, LOF and Templates. ZVZ: blocks LOS but not LOF. Intervening Models: block LOS, LOF but not Templates. Transparent Terrain: doesn't exist as a class of terrain outside of house rules, blocks LOF and Templates but not LOS. You normally need both LOS and LOF for a BS Attack to be valid. Sixth Sense allows you to respond to attacks from within LOF regardless of LOS (SSL1 is restricted to ZOC). 360 visor extends LOS to to 360 degrees instead of the normal 180, doesn't affect LOF or Facing. Facing and LOF are open information. LOS is not.
If you think that any blocking of LoS provides total cover than smoke grenades and intervening troopers provide total cover and thus shield from template weapons. Which we know is not true. Ergo your position is logically inconsistent. I take the part earlier in that same section that says "...Cover refers to all pieces of scenery that..." to mean that cover can *only* be provided by scenery, otherwise you get this silliness.
A lot of good stuff in there^. It would need fine tuning before publishing but the concept is spot on.
What's there about visibility zones that changes things? It would be both a zero-vis zone and total cover.
No, this is a false representation of what my beliefs convey, the rules for template weapons are very explicit in how they function: Each Template has a Blast Focus to determine if nearby scenery protects a trooper from the Template's effects. If LoF can be drawn from the Blast Focus to the trooper, then that trooper is affected by the Template. However, if the LoF cannot be drawn due to the presence of a piece of scenery, then the trooper is considered to be in Total Cover and is not affected by the Template. Emphasis mine. It's the template rules that limit the way they consider total cover to only regarding scenery. Interpreting the core rules as regarding a zero visibility zone as granting total cover does not in fact create the inconsistency you assert it does and is perfectly consistent.
@Spleen If you read that passage the implication is that only scenery provides Total Cover. What we have here is a situation not covered under the two possibilities given - either you can trace LoF from the point of origin, or it's blocked by scenery and thus there's total cover. But what if LoF from the center of the template is blocked by something other than scenery? The above passage does not provide for such an eventuality (typical for the quality of the N3 rulebook), but based off of examples we *do* know that template weapons propagate through things other than scenery. This implies that such things (Zero-v zones, intervening troopers) are *not* Total Cover, consistent with the description at the beginning of the terrain section that it is *scenery* which provides cover (of any sort), not troopers or Zero-V zones or anything of the sort.
Alternatively you can read it as Templates ignore Total Cover (except for that provided by scenery items). Which is the consistent way of reading it.
But scenery is the only thing that provides Total Cover. EDIT see also http://infinitythewiki.com/en/Mines#Trigger_Area which clearly shows models not providing Total Cover, without any mention of ignoring Total Cover for models.
