During the gunnery phase, can undetonated tracking weapons that have moved toward but not yet reached their target be attacked by a ships gunner?
For example, the starship 'Frictionless Unicorn' and the starship 'Mudslinger' are engaged in combat. One the first round they are 30 hexes apart, and Mudslinger fires a missile at Frictionless Unicorn. During that gunner phase the missile moves 14 hexes toward Unicorn. During the next helm phase, the two ships maneuver so that Unicorn is 15 hexes away from the missile. During the subsequent gunnery phase the missile continues tracking Unicorn and moves 14 hexes closer, so that it is adjacent to Unicorn.
Can Frictionless Unicorn fire, say, a turbolaser, at the missile? If so, at what range would it fire? At the starting range of the missile, or the final range (recall that during the gunnery phase, weapons fire is assumed to take place simultaneously)? What AC would it use? Would it use the 10+speed AC that weapons with the point special property use? Can tracking weapons be fired at other tracking weapons? If so, what range and AC would they use, and which tracking weapon would move first?
No.
There is no rule that says anything about whether you can target tracking weapons with weapons that do not have the point property and are greater than 0 hexes away, though the fact that allowing it would raise so many questions makes one guess that it was probably not something that the rules intended to allow.
There's no sensible reason why not other than 'design', which is fine, although it'd sure be nice if one could assign the ship's computer bonus to point defense checks. The heavy hitting tracking weapons move slower that the faster ships do. Point weapons' "point" quality are reactions by the gunner(s).
CIWS IRL is much, much more accurate and can pick off inbound homing missiles IRL in number at pretty good range. Point weapons at +8, +10 or +12 against significantly-high ACs ... not so much. They're a slim hope at best, albeit a back-up to enhancing TL to as a high a degree as can be afforded via passive defensive countermeasures.
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The answer is no, but I'll break it down a bit more than the earlier responses. A tracking weapon projectile has only four values - its position, its speed, its damage, and the DC point defenses roll against derived from its speed. This is very specifically a DC, not an AC; it has neither an armor class nor a target lock, so there's nothing to roll against to hit with a conventional attack. It has no hull points or shields, so there's nothing to reduce even if you do hit it. It doesn't even take up space - a projectile is present within a hex, but does not occupy it the way a ship does. Fundamentally, as the rules are written, a tracking weapon projectile is not an object that can interact with starships outside of the very specific framework of being fired, either missing in transit or eventually reaching its target, and then either being shot down by a very specific reaction or impacting the target and dealing damage.
You can't fire on tracking weapons outside of the point defense reaction because they do not have the statistics necessary to interact with the rest of the system that way.
Now, if you wanted to move beyond RAW and homebrew it a bit, basing things like AC and TL on their speed much like the point defense DC is would be a reasonable starting point. But keep in mind that tracking weapons already have a very significant trade-off built into them. The more damage they deal, the slower they are, and the slower they are, the easier they are to shoot down. If you start letting people fire on projectiles en route, then you need to be very careful or you may very quickly declaw tracking weapons that do anything except hit on the turn they're fired.
Now, if you wanted to move beyond RAW and homebrew it a bit, basing things like AC and TL on their speed much like the point defense DC is would be a reasonable starting point. But keep in mind that tracking weapons already have a very significant trade-off built into them. The more damage they deal, the slower they are, and the slower they are, the easier they are to shoot down. If you start letting people fire on projectiles en route, then you need to be very careful or you may very quickly declaw tracking weapons that do anything except hit on the turn they're fired.
Good advice, however, if you could shoot at them, it would open up a new use for tracking weapons-- using them as lures to draw fire away from your ship.
I suspect we will see some sort of rules, a feat, or something, for targeting tracking weapons in the future. There are just too many tricks that players will want to try. People will want to detonate a missile near a tracking weapon to potentially destroy it. People will want to spend 5 rounds launching tracking weapons without activating their engines, and then activate all of their engines at once so that their starship can move toward an opponent behind a screen of tracking weapons, etc.. Allowing all of that kind of thing only makes spaceship combat cooler.