I have noticed that all the turrents have a 360 degree arc. I was wondering, if there is a way, to make it a fixed forwarding weapon or limit the arc? I am a big fan of the battles in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Empire_(LOGH) anime series but their battles almost always consist of lines of frigates with fixed forwarding firing lasers.
I am currently reading the documentation on Creating your own ships and such so this is just a quick question before I get to the heart of it.
this would also be useful for a full conversion mod involving pirate ships
Try playing around with the “tracking_speed” variable in modules. My hunch is the ships just won’t fire at all, since the AI has ships turn/move to get in range but not once they’re in range. I’ll add this to the suggested modding features thread.
Restricted arc weapons could be big fun. Perhaps some classes of weapons have limited arcs for increased power…
I could see a class of spinal mounted weapons. Very high powered with miserable arcs. 'course, then you’d have to teach enemy ships to try and avoid being in the spinal arc.
There was a discussion about weapon firing arcs on clifski’s blog a few weeks before the beta started. He decided not to add them because it would require significantly more work to make the AI intelligent enough to chose and line up it’s shots properly. Just imagine a cruiser trying to pick of fighters with it’s spinal mounted laser and I think you’ll see the problem.
I tried this in an attempt to build a Robotech-esque main weapon. The turret will start pointed to the top of the screen & it will still track & fire… it just won’t hit anything. It seems tracking speed has more to do with the equation to determine whether a weapon has hit its target or not.