Don't really know how to flesh things out more here, but will we see any fixed weapons? Broadsides and weapons built around the front I mean. Things like MAC's from Halo or various ships from other universes (and our own.)
There could be turn offs, like (of course) the lack of reliable aiming and the inability to turn farther than a small amount. However, they could have various boosts such as higher power from the possibility of the weapon being larger and since the tech is probably slightly outdated in the LT universe, being cheaper to make and use.

There is an example of them in the crappy story I forget to update: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=385

Following up on this, I'd really like to see all fighter/bomber weapons as fixed. I was not at all a fan of the auto aiming in X. Rather, I like the style you see in all the good space combat sims where you shoot straight ahead, and only straight ahead. For one thing, it looks a lot better, and more importantly, it takes more skill and it's more fun.

Yeah fixed weapons would be REALLY nice. Or at least hardpoints with limited rotation capabilities like the ones in Freelancer. Broadside missile salvos would be soooo satisfying!

A simple way to implement this might be to allow a "fixed weapons" mount that can fit all the normal weapons but fit two of them instead (that can't be aimed ofcourse).

To balance it you might also want a parameter scaling down reload a bit so your final dps perhaps only is 1.5 times normal.



I agree that nimble Anti Capital ship fighter-bombers really doesn't need to aim at all when they are targeting things 100 times their size and 10 times slower, so putting turrets on them just doesn't make sense.

I'd use the MOO2 system.

The more freedom of movement (arc), the bigger the weapon gets in construction points.

Something like:

• Fixed installation: normal CP
  90° arc: 120% CP
  180° arc: 140% CP

Could be a sliding scale instead of fixed increments so you could scale the turret arc to what works for the placement on this model.

Could be a limitation at construction time. This way the game only needs to do the raycasting once to determine if ship bits are in the way when the turret arc is too great.
Otherwise the turret would routinely fire though the ship, which looks poopy - or fire at it's own ship, suiciding.

I like that idea. You could also take into account the tracking speed, based on the size of the weapon. Yes, you *could* have a heavy neutron laser in a 180 mount, but it'd track slowly because of the weight of the gun, plus all the servos and shizzle would be hugely expensive.

If a turret is slow, massive and expensive (as it would be for a large weapon), why bother with it at all? Why not make the weapon fixed, and just rotate the ship? By saving all that mass, the ship could have extra weapons / ammo / fuel / whatever.

The point about turrets is that they can rotate substantially faster than the ship, and multiple turrets allow engaging of several targets at once. Hence turrets are great for point defence of an unmanoeuvrable ship, but a bit pointless for bombardment or long range weapons where the ship has plenty of time to align itself with the target. Or for normal weapons in smaller, manoeuvrable ships, such as fighters.

I can imagine a long, thin ship with launchers in a herringbone layout, covering a certain angle. The ship lines up the outermost angled launcher, fires, and rotates continuously to the opposite angle, firing all launchers as they point at the target, in one continuous sweeping motion. That way a large ship could devastate a target (depending on its defences) in a matter of seconds. That same ship could hide behind a thick frontal shield if there is heavy incoming fire. Space Katyushas!

JabbleWok wrote:If a turret is slow, massive and expensive (as it would be for a large weapon), why bother with it at all? Why not make the weapon fixed, and just rotate the ship? By saving all that mass, the ship could have extra weapons / ammo / fuel / whatever.

The point about turrets is that they can rotate substantially faster than the ship, and multiple turrets allow engaging of several targets at once. Hence turrets are great for point defence of an unmanoeuvrable ship, but a bit pointless for bombardment or long range weapons where the ship has plenty of time to align itself with the target. Or for normal weapons in smaller, manoeuvrable ships, such as fighters.

Exactly! You could do it, but why would you want to? I suspect it could be viable for fairly large weapons, but there'd have to be a cutoff point where it becomes pointlessly expensive or the guns simply couldn't turn fast enough to make it worthwhile.

JabbleWok wrote:I can imagine a long, thin ship with launchers in a herringbone layout, covering a certain angle. The ship lines up the outermost angled launcher, fires, and rotates continuously to the opposite angle, firing all launchers as they point at the target, in one continuous sweeping motion. That way a large ship could devastate a target (depending on its defences) in a matter of seconds. That same ship could hide behind a thick frontal shield if there is heavy incoming fire. Space Katyushas!

You can never have enough missiles

Having enough missiles would mean having enough dakka.

Never. Enough. Dakka.

NEVA ENUF DAKKA

The Hedge Knight wrote:NEVA ENUF DAKKA

Agreed. We need at least (DAKKA)³

The other thing that long ships could do with is a means of dodging while setting up shots, i.e. lateral movement. Hence large 'sideways' engines would be useful. If incoming unguided rounds are detected, such engines could allow the ship to dodge them while still pointing at the enemy, preparing for the next shot. Or just to cause random lateral motion making it harder for the enemy to target them. Manoeuvre engines on steroids! Now that would be much more useful than a turret.

A feature of large battles may be a Jutland-style slugging match, intermixed with action by swarms of smaller ships.

JabbleWok wrote:If a turret is slow, massive and expensive (as it would be for a large weapon), why bother with it at all?

Because a slow massive expensive turret is very likely to be sitting on a significantly more massive/slow/expensive capital ship

Even if 10 degree per second is slow of a turret it is probably much faster then that massive ship realistically can achieve. And to get the final value of how much you can turn around your aim you add "turret turn speed" + "ship turn speed".

So even if the turret is super slow and only can turn the same speed as you ship, you still double the final turn speed which means half the time until you can press that fire button and annihilate whatever is in your way.

Ixos wrote:Because a slow massive expensive turret is very likely to be sitting on a significantly more massive/slow/expensive capital ship

Even if 10 degree per second is slow of a turret it is probably much faster then that massive ship realistically can achieve. And to get the final value of how much you can turn around your aim you add "turret turn speed" + "ship turn speed".

So even if the turret is super slow and only can turn the same speed as you ship, you still double the final turn speed which means half the time until you can press that fire button and annihilate whatever is in your way.

A cap could be built around a massive gun; putting the same gun into a turret would significantly increase the mass of the ship. What's more, the moments of inertia of the gun would remain the same, so that it would be almost as hard to rotate the turreted gun as it would a gun-based ship. Maybe even more, as the mass of the turret would be added, and you also have to take into account the rotation of a counterweight so as to keep the whole ship stable. So effectively you could be doubling/tripling the size of a ship just to include a turret for its main gun.

If you need to rotate so quickly, that means your target has to be quite close to cause such transverse motion; however, surely that would not be the main purpose of such weapons? Wouldn't they be long range i.e. cap vs. cap combat would be at far greater ranges than for smaller ships? Such a battle would be resolved long before two caps ever got that close. Unless you're thinking they'll be like galleons that draw up alongside and pound each other to smithereens?

Put it another way; take the gun out of the turret+ship+counterweight, add an engine, habs, RCS and fuel tanks, and Voila! You now have a smaller, nimbler ship with the same firepower. I'd happily field that against a turreted equivalent.

I cannot think of a useful scenario for turrets other than for smaller weapons at close range, where high transverse velocity is an issue. You don't use artillery to shoot down a jet.

Don't forget that turrets are very useful for engaging multiple targets at once. A cap ship could fly between two others and engage them both using turreted weapons.
Ships without turrets are also more likely to get hit. If you need to point your ship to a target to be able to shoot it, that means you're flying in a predictable way. With turrets you can fly more randomly and let them do the tracking. Even at distances.

I'm not sure why you need counter weights in space. But I'm not very familiar with space physics.

Katorone wrote:Don't forget that turrets are very useful for engaging multiple targets at once. A cap ship could fly between two others and engage them both using turreted weapons.

True, but that implies that the enemy caps somehow get that close. If your cap is basically a massive gun with an engine, then you should be able to kill the enemy (or be killed by it) long before it gets that close. I'm equating such a cap to artillery or a giant anti-materiel weapon, which you would never use for close-quarters combat. Likely each shot would take some time to set up, e.g. charging capacitors or something.

If you are in close quarters combat with multiple targets, then turrets are extremely useful. However, that's really point defence, which would involve smaller weapons with a much more rapid rate of fire. Maybe there's a case for having "fire support" ships that specialise in close quarters fighting (as well as fighters), but I'd suggest those would be smaller and more manoeuvrable than caps, as that manoeuvring ability would be important to their usefulness.

There's a common idea to equate spaceships with naval vessels, but I don't think that parallel holds because of the different environmental physics. Naval battleships use turrets for main weaponry because their manoeuvre ability is important as range is still short (horizon or closer). Conversely spacecraft could engage at far greater distances, so a massive long-range weapon would be extremely useful. While you could build a single giant ship with many such weapons, it would make a massive target itself and be extremely unmanoeuvrable. If you take the same weapons and turn them into separate ships, then you have the same firepower but forming much smaller targets with far more manoeuvrability. Ideally you don't want your caps to ever be caught up in close-quarters fighting, but you'd use smaller ships to screen them. If you're sensible!

Of course, that's for "firepower" caps - there may well be other caps such as carriers and EW which have no major offensive weaponry on board, so all armaments would be defensive.

Ships without turrets are also more likely to get hit. If you need to point your ship to a target to be able to shoot it, that means you're flying in a predictable way. With turrets you can fly more randomly and let them do the tracking. Even at distances.

Not necessarily so. For a start, a long, a thin single-gun ship would have a very small cross section, so would present a small target. 99% of shielding could be at the front. A turreted equivalent would be much easier to hit and harder to shield. If there are powerful transverse engines, a thin ship pointing at the enemy could still dodge enough to avoid incoming fire and make enemy aiming more difficult. For a more massive, turreted ship, the transverse dodging would be much smaller so it would be easier to hit, as well as being a larger target anyway. The one downside would be the inability to simultaneously fire while flying quickly another location, but I suggest that is a much smaller downside than the alternative. It means that cap bombardment ships would use their main engines to get to a fire position, not to fly while firing. In that sense it's far more like artillery than a tank, and with the vast distances of space, having that long-range firepower would be critical long before close-in manoeuvring can take place.

I'm not sure why you need counter weights in space. But I'm not very familiar with space physics.

Angular momentum is always conserved. On Earth, if you rotate a turret, you rotate the Earth in the oposite direction. As the Earth is a zillion times more massive than the turet, it only rotates a zillionth as much. In space if you rotate a mass, there has to be an equal and opposite effect to conserve that angular momentum. Gyroscopes could be useful for that, but they would make ship manoeuvring much more difficult and unpredictable as they're not at the ship's centre-of-mass - the bicycle wheel effect. Large counterweights may be better, but they add mass and bulk to your ship, making it a slower and larger target. Hence the smaller the turret, the better. If you have a single gun-ship, then central gyros and a reaction control system would give you full, predictable manoeuvrability. You have more fire-power per mass, which (assuming sensible use of mass) would be the statistical decider in space warfare. Physics-wise I see it as a much better option.

Edit===

Take a step back and ask - what's the point of warships at all? Ultimatately it has to be the ability to defend & destroy economic assets, such as stations. To spend the least money on a a warship that can destroy defended stations, you'd build a massive long-range gun. To increase the effectiveness per credit, you'd make such guns more manoeuvrable and defensible, not compromise them chaining them together and adding unncessary mass. Hence 10 x single-gun ships > 1 x 10-gun turreted ship.