Dozer and Smigg & Gunnbjorne boosted blast damage rolls

Question

So Dozer and Smigg have a bond with Gunnbjorne which states that while in his control range, D&S gain boosted blast damage rolls. If a shot from their Bombard directly hits, is the damage roll auto boosted from the bond? What I'm not clear on is if a direct hit with an AOE weapon is considered blast damage.

Answer 1

Blast damage are half-strength or half pow attacks. A Direct Hit of any AOE weapon is "normal" damage, everything else in the AOE suffer blast damage.

Thus the target directly hit suffer an unboosted hit. That might seems counter-intuitive but it's basically (even unboosted) always strictly superior in term of damage, except for very very low damage attacks/weapons.

Source : Blast Damage rules in the little handbook (in my printed version it's around page 57)