To me as a player never happened to experience a defect it this area of the game, but as you pointed out there a bunch of tricky points that I recap here.

The rules are:
1) if a ship has fired to both sides, it will reload the broadside the player instruct to do.
2) if the player forget to specify left or right, the system will decide randomly (50% chance).
3) if there is only one side to load, the system will load that side, without considering the player instructions.

Besides firing arc, minimum distance and HDT - that sometimes confuse new gamers - consider this example.

1) my ships fire both sides, left and right
2) my right side target is destroyed (and no other targets on my right side are present)
3) I forget to define the reload side
4) the system reload my right and obviously does not fire.
5) I check ships status and I find my left boardside red shining EMPTY.
6) I check the "last 6 events" and I do not find any track of firing (but it's correct)


Normally I associate "EMPTY" to "FIRED" but this is not correct. Empty means empty.

To avoid this mistake I coded a modification to the game. It works in the following way:
1) the system puts a black smoke besides the boardside(s) that fired
2) as soon as the player operates that ship (move or give any other instruction, or press the move button) it transforms it in grey smoke, showing which side is in process to be reloaded.

This change will be part of the new version and it will be put online by Nick when possible, depending on many other modifications in course...

Another cause of confusion about the topic discussed in this thread, is when the player choose the option "fire if the hdt is at least" let's say 3. The confusion is that the messages printed in the last 6 events portlet is different if the current hdt is 0 or more. I do not have the text available here, but trust me, they are different (this could be considered bug but a very small one)!

Finally, before XMas and Happy New Year greetings , if you find a bug, please provide more information to let us investigate better. I will post a new thread with our reccomendations....

ciao Ale