I had a retard drunk thought;
>>95964485
>how to do damage in a novel way when weapons fire is auto-hit and represented by tokens moving around the board
>players have Action Points/Time Units/etc. that are expended to do basically anything in combat
Weapons directly damage your AP/TUs/etc, doing so by a flat value determined at character/item generation. That value can go negative.
Let players spend their stats (str/con/etc)(temporarily, heals with long rest/visit to repair bay/other narrative reason) to gain a few AP/TUs/etc at at 1:1 ratio.
doing nothing on a turn costs a paltry 1 point. You *must* at least take that "action" to continue being alive if you do nothing else. (All other actions include continuing to breathe)
So you can spend some stats to go the extra step or alpha-strike with lots of expensive actions, but smarter play is to spend them to not die.

So say you have 10 points after your spending for the turn, and a weapon does 20. You're at -10, so either you die next turn, or you spend 11 total points of STR/CON/INT/WIS/etc to get the necessary one AP to keep breathing. Naturally, you can't spend stats beyond 0, having negative strength overall makes no sense. Leave it up to the player to explain how spending those points saved them, if the group cares about that kind of thing.

I think it would even aid fluff and roleplaying; if you're a bard embroiled in life-or-death combat, you're not going to be playing your lute at your best if you keep spending CHA to not die. Or, you're very practiced bard and a powergamer irl and CHA stays up but you dump STR to represent a fey-like dodging of attacks to keep shredding that not-guitar, but now you can't bonk anybody with your emergency mace when you need to. But either method of Not Dying can only be kept up so long, and should impart the proper vibe of getting tired the longer fighting goes on and making big hits be a Fun crisis to resource-manage when they finally happen.