GUNS GUNS GUNS

I like that idea for #1, obviously you would not want to put the game into intense easy mode. My main reason is coming off of flight sims and leading and landing a super long range shot is unquestionably satisfying, most of the time when it misses it does so along a linear path where in the target ship is accelerating or strafing linearly sideways in one direction. I feel like automating it fully would be too on the easy side of thing, unless the enemy also had randomised strafing, in which case you open up a whole new bag of worms where battles not only have intense fighting but the roll, scatter, re orient,

(actually this is where i think i should mention that a dedicated strafe function is needed to differentiate between reorienting the whole ship and using retranslation instead of only reorientation, but i digress) 

become intensely important and you now have something akin to orbital Air Combat Manoeuvres(awesome but holy shit tense). Im not sure if you would be cool with such a huge set of overhauls, which is why i suggested the more moderate nudge option to help land shots. I mean automating everything would be nuts, you would need like super manoeuvrable CIWS ships to act as some sort of in between for ships and drones, like the cutter. It sounds very cool in my head but you are the king of this project so it's up to you.

-Automated lead/pure/lag pursuit options /w/ automated dodging= very cool but very costly on the D/v
Perhaps a setting of pursuit options would also benefit those trying the rail-gun missile tactic? Like wise a set of evasive movement options (none/moderate/extreme) coupled with the current jumble of roll/re orient/ etc

Manual aiming would be fun for one gun at a time used in conjunction with the ai to help land shots, i think it would feel very "space captain" ish

I realise im just vomiting ideas at this point.

As for #2 pretty straight forward  and for #3 mainly to help ships with corner mounts on the outer hull, i have been experimenting with Marauder variants and have found that the current placement of turrets makes them only 50% as use full, as they can only point out (if mounted forward they clash with the main coilgun, and even without the coilgun they still only cover a rough 180 frontal arch). So that got me thinking about corner, or even nutso spacer mounted cannons.  I mean think about it if you could effectively corner mount a frontal/side wise cannon you would cut down on the number of turrets (and horrible weight) your ship would need. Add in a support brace that extends from the hull and now not only does the turret have a 360o firing angle(save for the ships dead-zone, which it is attached to)  You would also space out your cannons on gun pod like mounts making your frontal target larger but also less centralised, as the pole turrets would (if fired upon) draw shots away from the central hull.

This all leads to what just popped in my head as #4: Side mountable spacers(or i guess struts now?) not directly mounted into the central "spine" stack. These could hold a number of useful designs, everything from a nuclear generator separated outside the hull, sparing radiation effects for the crew, radiators mounted away from the hull so as to not endanger other components if lost(also they look like cool space wings wowey zowey space!) to the aforementioned turrets or flare launchers or missile launcher etc. I suppose tensile strength would need to be considered as well as centre of mass. OH ALSO! OFF BODY THRUSTERS! Like the star furies in Babylon five! yielding much faster rotation and translation speeds. Armouring the struts would ideally be done directly to the unit and not with the current full body main armour layer.


few ok that's all i can think of for now, i guess this is my ideas thread?        

For what it's worth, I too would love to see these types of attach points. As mentioned from a tactical standpoint, it'd give enemies something else to shoot at, and would open up the possibility of adding "spaced armor", a "cigar in a cigar" thing.

I think part of why the gun mounts are external only is that the clear assumption is that the gun is dumping heat via the barrel - containing that in the ship should logically require additional radiators, so you'd need to do some work to make sure it's generating the right amount of additional workload at the right temperature. I'd assume it's in pipeline, but there's a lot on the docket already.