[NJSP 3002]

so how do i get the beams to fire on capital ships i read the fred guide still dont say

[General Battuta]

Beam-free the ships with a beam-free-all event, beam-free individual turrets, or check 'all ships beam-freed by default' in Mission Specs.

[Droid803]

In reality, you would know that if you actually read the FRED walkthrough.
It does say it, contrary to popular belief.
You just have to read it.

What it doesn't cover is the new SCP feature which is "All ships beam freed by default".

Anyhow, if you haven't, you should read through the walkthrough. It helps. A lot. It'll save you a lot of headaches in the future as it tells you how to do even some pretty annoying and complex stuff like docking sequences properly.
It's pretty  time consuming, but then again, FREDding is time consuming.

[stuart133]

There is also the slight problem that an attack order tends to cause capships to move into non-beam firing positions.

[General Battuta]

Attack orders should almost never be used with capships.

Arguably with cruisers that work well in circle-firing actions (Aeolus, whatnot) but probably not with anything bigger.

[The E]

Yep. Anything above a cruiser should be scripted using waypoints. The FS2 way of moving big capships around just looks ridiculous when applied to big capital ships.

Side note: It would be rather nice if there was a flag to set that would allow ships to follow an interpolated path along a set of waypoints. It would do a lot to make capship movement seem a lot more fluid than it is now.

[Dragon]

Somebody in SCP should try improving capship AI to the levels seen in RTS games or cap simulations like "Star Trek: Bridge Commander".

[General Battuta]

The risk with that is that a capship duel will become as difficult to script and carefully control as a fighter duel. Might be good, might be bad.

[headdie]

to "fix" capship combat ideally you would need the ships to be able to assess the weapons it has and its targets along with flags that affect damage taken and dealt and range then work out the range to maintain for its best chance

[Black Wolf]

No you don't - don't overcomplicate it. All you need is a second AI Option. Attack would stay as Attack (Broadside), but still be called attack so as not to break backwards compatibility, with the other option being Attack (Head on), perhaps changing the capship to using bomber AI. This way you cover 99% of ship weapon configurations with a relatively minor change from a FREDders POV.

[Thaeris]

The FRED walkthrough is pretty handy, but it certainly doesn't teach you all the new things about FSO. In that sense, I'd really like to see the community put out a new manual. This in many ways might be just as important to users as a completely rebuilt FRED... which is unlikely to happen for some time. In that sense, a new manual would probably be a better start.

[karajorma]

Ahem.

[stuart133]

Ahem.

Good work there. 

[Thaeris]

'Seems I wasn't aware of that, Kara. Thank you.

[karajorma]

Not a problem. I haven't really done more than post it on that thread because

a) It's really for Diaspora
b) It's not finished yet.