Spinal Mounted Weapons Accuracy Issues

I'm going to resurrect this thread because the issue is still there. As far as I can tell, the issue stems from a problem with the broadside command.

Essentially, broadside is trying to put the ship into a fixed orientation which allows the weapons to aim at their targets. This is great for gimballed/turreted weapons because this minimizes the footwork the targeting systems have to do in terms of calculating a firing solution, especially with a moving target. However, this is extremely suboptimal for fixed mount weapons for anything but a perfectly fixed target. The ship aims the gun at the target and begins to fire, but as soon as the target moves out of the acceptable error range of the solution, the ship has to recalculate and reorient, and stops firing during this process. Once it has aimed back towards the target, it fires again, and the cycle repeats. The higher the angular velocity of the target, the less time it will spend in the acceptable firing solution before our ship has to reorient.

This contrasts sharply with the turrets, which move smoothly while firing, enabling fire as accurate as the weapon will allow. While an accelerating target does confuse turrets sometimes, they can handle non-accelerating moving targets just fine, but spinal weapons can't. I couldn't even hit a space station with low relative velocity with my gun, despite having a ring of 2MN RP-1 resistojet RCS thrusters for aiming, with considerable control authority (at least considerable for a capital ship as large as mine). I suspect that drones aren't as hindered by this problem because their weapons are far less accurate, engage at much closer ranges, and have very high directional authority and can turn fast enough to negate this problem.

As far as I can tell, the best solution is simply for the broadside algorithm to detect the presence of spinal or fixed-mount weapons and employ a targeting routine more similar to the turrets (where the entire ship will maintain a calculated rotational motion to continuously track the target) instead of the regular broadside (which kills rotation once aligned).

I hope this can be fixed at some point, it cripples ships that use internal mounts to protect their weapons; they are already penalized by being limited by the large rotational inertia of capital vessels and the added mass required to effectively aim such a large ship.

I can verify that this happens. It looks like spinal mounted weapons don't take relative velocity of the firing ship properly into account. If tangential velocity is 0, they do hit pretty well.

Simply implementing a fudge factor of 1° where the gun can still fire slightly off from where it is actually aimed would make the problem go away immediately. Given the space inside ship noses, there would no doubt be a toroidal tank qswitched-sama pls an internal gimbal mechanism where the muzzle is hinged at the armour join (or ideally just behind it with the armour overlapping) and the breech-end moves around freely to tilt the weapon. This could be explicitly implemented as an extra part of module design, but the simple fudge factor solution would satisfy me.

If you watch the trailer for the game you'll see Stinger drones turning and immediately beginning to fire again as they pass their target. This feels like it has progressively gotten worse with updates, the finishing blow being the update that brought actual dodging and aim prediction.