Hint: When looking for 2 letter consonants combos, search for H and C. H will narrow you down to S-H, C-H and the less common W-H. C will narrow you down to C-R, C-L, C-H, or C-K. While it’s possible to have letters like K without the C, it’s extremely uncommon.

The reasons why are:

1) No minimum range. — This means–against mortars or missiles like the Rapier–you have the option of charging and continuing to fire with all of your onboard weapons. Instead of a split mix, you can use all of your weapons all of the time.

2) Rapid reloading — The base reload time is 3 seconds. Which doesn’t sound too short until you consider the lasers are giving you a 100% accuracy rate AND the potential to switch targets in-flight if you kill the first target. The actual DPS comes out to be just under the Ripper III and IV because of it with half again the range.

3) Light weight — For the DPS, the missiles are relatively light. Additionally, the two specials you select (on BB’s and above) aren’t too weighty either. This means you can have the heavier armors and not have a glass cannon. It’s easy to fit Titanium 4 on a Battle Barge with 4 Strike-L’s, laser targeting, and either rocket booster II (for 19% more range or about 78 range) or Enhanced Warhead 2 (22% more damage or 122 per missile). This means continuous fire from range 0 to 66 (or 78) with no safe areas for enemies.

4) Because of weight, you can fit them on smaller ships. For the marauder, you can use the less-damage, high accuracy strike missile and simply mount Engine II to get in close against mortars. Or, most BB’s, if they don’t stop moving are essentially immune to mortars anyway. By moving towards the enemy, you both continue to do more damage with all of your systems and avoid their mortars…

5) If you want max-range kiters, you can mix Strike Missiles on a ship with Cutlass or Rapier. — All of your special upgrades that apply for your long range weapons, especially rocket boost, also apply to the Strikes. You can use your longer range missiles for primary attack and have the strikes for point-blank defense while maximizing the use of your specials to “buff up” all of them. So, a Leviathan with 3 or 4 long range Cutlass III’s can have those backstopped by 1 or 2 Strike missiles…

I used to read my OSPD (Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary) to sleep, particularily the Q, X, Z, K, and Y words. Nowdays I would be studing the

Official Tournament and Club Word List or Tournament Word List, referred to as OTaCWL, OWL, or TWL, is the official word authority for tournament Scrabble in the USA, Canada[1] and Thailand. It is based on the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) with modifications to make it more suitable for tournament play. Its British counterpart is Chambers Official Scrabble Words, and the combination of the two word lists is known as SOWPODS.

Two letter play is a must so I used this 2 letter word list, that shows the front and back one letter hooks http://www.wolfberg.net/scrabble/wordlists/OWL2/twos-to-threes.html and added the international words and made it printable http://files1.guildlaunch.net/guild/library/16828/Two_letter_words_and_extensions.pdf

Most of those 2 letter words don’t look like real words, so someone added definitions:
http://www.hasbro.com/scrabble/en_US/2LetterList.cfm

The list of 3 letter words with their front and back hooks is too big to make into a printable but is here:
http://www.sanjeev.net/scrabble/3-to-make-4-wordlist.html

just the words no hooks:
http://phrontistery.info/scrabble3.html

As Spitt mentioned being able to play the high letter tiles is a must so studying the 2 and 3 letter lists can really help increase your score…. playing an X at the right spot to get the tripple letter bonus twice because you knew ax, ex, xi, and xu were words it is always great to get over 50 points for two tiles!

There are some online tools to help sharpen your game:

Hooks are a great way to build your score. Find the one letter that can be added to the front of each of the words below to form another very common word. http://www.hasbro.com/scrabble/en_US/hooks.cfm

The OSPD crabble® hallenge
http://ironphoenix.org/scrabble/

Free crossword game artificial intelligence and analysis tool that rivals the best players in the world! http://people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/quackle/

A few years ago I played the odd game of Scrabble with someone I’ll dub “the drama queen” considering that she came to me for help in her college english courses (me with my lowly high school diploma) she was a good player, BUT her youngest was in the terrible twos stage and trying to keep a running game going (she rarely had more than 30 minutes at a time to play) was a disaster so I made the next two printables to keep track of our games, we played regular Scrabble when at my house and Super Scrabble at hers. The charts allow for both and tile counting, space for words played:

black and white: http://files1.guildlaunch.net/guild/library/16828/scrabblescoresheet.pdf
color: http://files1.guildlaunch.net/guild/library/16828/superscrabble_illustrated.pdf

An official National Scrabble Association contestant score sheet:
http://www.scrabble-assoc.com/forms/scoresheet.pdf

if you notice they PROVIDE a space to cross off tiles, so “tile counting” isn’t cheating, it’s just smart play

I mostly play boggle at pogo now, as Scrabble does take a long time and it is frustrating when your opponent drops out of the game….it sure is hard to find someone who will actually play to the finish even if they are being beaten like a drum…

In this day of online Scrabble/anagram tools like: http://www.a2zwordfinder.com/anagram.html and Boggle word finders http://www.bolsboardgames.com/ World With Friends http://www.lexicalwordfinder.com/ it is hard to play against “cheaters” so that is the main reason I play Boggle as I play against the game itself, did I find at least one of the longest possible words? ALL the 5 to 6 letter words? In pogo Boggle you can often spot the ones using the word finders as there is always a pause at the start of each game as they enter the grid into their word finders I sometimes comment on that between games when the pause PLUS unbelievable high scores occur

Highest Single Move “Words With Friends” Score
http://recordsetter.com/world-record/highest-point-value-give-for-single-word-game-words-with-friends/5303

Words With Friends Rulebook
http://newtoyinc.com/gameswithfriends/support/Words_With_Friends_Rulebook.html

◦Stealth over to the enemy
◦Acid Blade
◦Start the fight off with Hidden Strike.
◦Follow with Lacerate. (NEEDS TACTICAL ADVANTAGE)
◦Frag Grenade
◦Follow with Stim Boost (NEEDS TACTICAL ADVANTAGE)
◦Corrosive Grenade (SHOULD BE CORROSIVE DART)
◦Shiv as much as possible.
◦Overload Shot
◦Repeat the process

Hidden strikle will give you one tactical advantage and you can lacerate. Frag grenade is next, but you can’t stim boost because you have no tactical advantage. Only way to get tactical advantage is to attack someone out of stealth and Shiv. Shiv comes at the end. So you wont get your tactical advantage til then to stim boost.

The rotation should be:

Acid Blade
Hidden strike (Will give you one tacticla advantage)
Corrosive Dart (Dot needs to be put on early as possible)
Shiv (Gives you your second tactical advantage)
Stim boost (Uses 1 tactical advantage)
Lacerate (Uses your other tactical advantage)
Overload shot or Rifle shot as a filler
repeat from Corrosive Dart