[Bug] Spastic turrets

A strange bug affects turrets for their first shot at a new target. In all cases, rather than tracking to aim at the target, the turret will jump to a random-seeming orientation and shoot. Sometimes, they reload without having fired.

For most dramatic results:

  1. Create a frigate with a Rapid Fire Laser. I used a Cobra frigate with a micro crew and engine 3.
  2. Deploy it in Defending Sirius as close to the incoming fighters as possible.
  3. As the fighters approach, move down to 0.2x speed and watch the turret carefully.
  4. When firing the first time, the turret rotates 120 degrees counter clockwise, and never actually shoots a bullet.

I tested most of the weapon classes, and the problem is the most obvious for the ones that shoot projectiles rather than beams. In all cases, it looks like upon firing, the turret “jumps” 120 degrees away from the direction it shot in. Plasma and missiles create a projectile that seems to do damage as normal. However, for bullets it looks like the shot is never created, so those guns “lose” a turn. (“SIM_BulletWeaponModule”, “SIM_MissileModule”, “SIM_PlasmaLauncherModule”)

Still occurs for the rest, but it’s much less obvious, since there is always a beam animation. The jumping also only lasts for a split second: the turret quickly reverts back to the direction the beam is being fired in, independent of the tracking speed of the weapon. (“SIM_BeamWeaponModule”, “SIM_ECMBeamModule”, “SIM_PointDefenseModule”)

Pretty hard to spot, but now that I know it’s there I can’t ignore it. I do laugh seeing all the turrets spaz out at the beginning of a battle though, especially in some people’s plasma gun challenges :smiley:

This will be fixed in version 1.09 :smiley: