[General Battuta]

You might be right - you really might be, it's possible I haven't given this enough thought. I certainly don't know the systems involved nearly as well as you do.

I guess I'm just jumpy because some recent changes have crept in and caused unintended problems. Blue Planet is basically unplayable right now due to an AI change that crept in somewhere in 3.6.14 dev. No one noticed it for a long time and now it's screwing people up. Again, though - you may be right in guessing that this just won't have any direct or indirect effects worth worrying about.

What sort of change? It's possible it was my fault somehow, so I'd like to know (PM me with details if you'd like).

Talk to Goob, he's probably got more specifics on a good place to repro. We're all sort of fuzzily aware of it but nobody has done any rigorous testing or figured out where exactly it appeared.  Sorry we're not giving you the testing you need, I know it'd help a lot.

[Goober5000]

I haven't looked at the SVN logs because I haven't had time yet, Sushi, but if you'd like to take a look, the problem was reported to appear between RCs 3 and 4.  Here's the thread: http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=80273.0

Zookeeper, FSO additions (both features and fixes) that have any potential to change balance or AI should always be off by default.  The problem is that we usually don't know whether gameplay is going to be affected, and nobody has time to play through every single released FreeSpace mission to be absolutely sure.  Yes, it's annoying, but what is even more annoying is when FSPort or Blue Planet mysteriously becomes unwinnable and nobody has any idea what happened.  (See the thread linked above.)  Then people have to go and either comb through the code or carefully compile and test builds for each SVN revision.

So this is a policy born of necessity.  We want to save ourselves an awful lot of frustration and lost time down the road.

[zookeeper]

They're both behind game_settings.tbl flags now.

[karajorma]

Those two really should be in their own #Ships section.

[General Battuta]

They're both behind game_settings.tbl flags now.

That's a super awesome feature. Thanks again.

[Spoon]

They're both behind game_settings.tbl flags now.

That's a super awesome feature. Thanks again.

What battuta said. Definitely going to be using both of these! 

[Scourge of Ages]

The turret-barrel-damage thing will definitely affect Bearbaiting.

You know how there's those big flak guns on the front of the Sathanas that will make your life miserable, and how it's standard practice to blast them with trebuchets? Previously, if the trebs hit the barrels, they do next to nothing; the only way to take out the turrets was to come in from above or below the barrels to hit the turrets themselves.
This feature will definitely make that part easier, but I consider that an improvement.

How do the new models fare in this department?

For an example, see this LP, where the guy specifically mentions having to take a precise angle at the turrets: http://lparchive.org/Freespace-2/Update%2023/