Discovery Gaming Community

Has there been any discussion among the devs about making the gunboat forward gun a heavy mount, using the turret-splitting construct? This could be useful as a mechanism for making it swappable on ships that have one, while also preventing its use on ships that do not. Specifically classify the gun and the mounting point as class-6 turret (destroyer turret), and then let the hard point be usable for any other class-6 or class-5 weapon.

Sounds crazy but numbers seem alright. The BHG forward gun does 31,000/15,500 damage for 165,000 energy (5.3:1 energy:hull), while the gunboat battle razor does 18,650/9325 damage for 115,000 energy (6.18:1 energy:hull). For comparison, the stock Liberty Cruiser Turret does 2300/1150 for 7000 (3.04:1). Yeah it's a better ratio but it's so much less damage per second... the benefit comes from being able to spin it around like other turrets. If the mount also accepted class-5 turrets, then you could mount another gunboat turret, or even a gunboat razor and get the weaker damage and ratio in exchange for the larger firing arc. In other words, it opens options for less damage-per-second for the gunboats that can mount the turrets, but nothing that does more damage per second than the forward gun itself.

The other benefit is that it precludes gunboats that cannot mount them from using them to gain additional power. Ships like the tridente with their stupid 8 guns and stupid profile and stupid turning radius could not mount the forward gun or destroyer turrets.

I do like the idea about being able to install gunboat turret instead of FC... but you'll probably get in answer that those boats were balanced with a FC in mind.

Sure...sounds cool. I'll be sure to get that done for ye.



*Thinks*

Oh yeah balance. :/

Installing a turret wouldn't help - the hardpoint is still fixed forward. You'd just get a less powerful turret.

' Wrote:Installing a turret wouldn't help - the hardpoint is still fixed forward. You'd just get a less powerful turret.

Truly said, even BRs are useless, you'd just get a less powerful turret.

Okay. Can the movement restriction be moved to the weapons or is it only available on the mounting point? What I'm thiking is there isn't a generic FG so limits on a specific ship could be handled by limiting the faction-specific FG movement. It's alright for the forward mount to restrict movement, such as do not point backwards into the cockpit, but if the restricted FG arc was moved to the FG proper then that would solve the secondary problem.

[rewritten for clarity]

Curious about the mechanics now. Looking at the mounts in FLstat and I don't see any any movement restrictions in the INI files. Are the movement restrictions in the models? If so then the restrictions can be added to the faction-specific FG models direclty right?

I found a previous discussion on this and it was shown that the forward gun arc restrictions could be moved to the gun instead of the hard point.

http://discoverygc.com/forums/index.php?sh...mp;#entry690920

Doing that in combination with changing it to a class 6 turret, would seem to set things up nicely. It would also allow the FG to be used on cruisers, and keep the limited arcs:D

Well, the thing is.. FW cannons on gunboats are a good idea but most gunboats wich sport them are not agile enough to use them properly, at least in 1v1 but if you use them in a small fleet against bigger targets they are pretty useful.

So if you want to fight alone, take a Gunship instead.

' Wrote:I found a previous discussion on this and it was shown that the forward gun arc restrictions could be moved to the gun instead of the hard point.

http://discoverygc.com/forums/index.php?sh...mp;#entry690920

I tested this a little bit and it more or less works. Changing the hard-point from revolute to fixed makes the hard-point use the min/max rotetion of the gun itself. Interestingly the guns already have limited arc of 7/-7 since they can be mounted on other ships with class-7 gun mounts, so there is actually no immediate change by doing this.

The real issue is when you define the hardpoint for other kinds of weapons, like class-5 turrets or whatever. The rotation is restricted by the HPConnect of the item, and most turrets dont have any restriction, so they all end up shooting backwards through the cockpit/ship. This could be addressed by making gun equivalents of whatever weapon you wanted to allow there, such as a gun battle razor, or a gun pulse weapon, and limit the arc on those.

Balance is not as much a problem as you might think--an extra turret just runs out of power sooner.