[Fozzy]

I had this idea the other night.

say you were on a bombing mission or had to get to a jump node with in a sertian amount of time and you didn't have enough time to stay and play with those shivans, you could instead press a key combination like.......

.....Shift and erm, a key thats not used and take controal of a turret on your bomber/assualt ship, whilst the ship your flying is left to fly in exactly the same way as you left it.

i know this is a lot of code and unprobable to impliment properly, but i thourt it was worth mentioning.

its now 01:27 "ish"  in england and i am off to bed to think up some more crazy stuff, like alowing parts to rotate on player ships (dont think its possable at the moment.)

[mikhael]

Ah, back to the good old days of Wing Commander!

Hop in a Broadsword and control three different turrets (or was it four?) while your bomber flies ponderously toward a capship waiting for torpedo lock.

[Mav]

It actually was three turrets, and it usually wasn't the best of ideas to fly straightforward in anyones field of fire except you were sure to be able to down him within some seconds.

But yes, it would be quite nice to be able to control turrets again.

[Thorn]

Maybe something along the lines of Allegiance.
Multiple people in the same ship. One flying and everyone else on gun turrets....

[TrashMan]

What if a ship has multiple turrets?
In which one do you hop in then?

The Freelancer solution I don't like, since it ties up all the guns that can fire on one target (and besides, in FL you could still move the ship around..in FS you would be a sitting duck), while the others stay still.

Better to have firecover on all sides...especially on a bomber...

[Mav]

Well, just like the Broadsword in WC2. It had 3 turrets (one left, one right and one back), each selecting individual targets. And when you wanted to take control of a turret you could cycle through all three to the one you wanted, while (as far as I remember) an AI pilot took control of your ship.

[SadisticSid]

Do like in X2 and have a hotkey to cycle through the different turrets on your ship.

[Nico]

In Wing co Prophecy, was simple, if you had a turret on the back of the ship, well, if you switched to back view, you were in the turret

[Kazan]

and AI did not take control of your ship in wing commander (any of them) you just flew straight ... kinda lame

[Mav]

Okay, then it didn't take control. I wasn't sure about this one anyway.
The question now is: what would be better for FS?

A possible reason for your ship just flying straightforward would be to not loose a torpedo-lock, which you might have no time to regain afterwards; while obviously an AI taking control of the ship for the time you're in a turret might enhance your survivability (while also making it harder to hit your target with the turret).

Or, if possible, FREDers/MODers should be able to designate which one of these options should be used (maybe some totally passive AI for flying straightforward should be implemented; you'd have to be able to select that AI's type as FREDer anyway).
Or the option could be selected by the bomber/fighter flags in the ships.tbl .

And Nico: Correct, that's just how it worked in WC2 (I forgot to mention that detail); but in FS you might have more than one turret for a given side, so you'd at least need to be able to cycle through these by pressing some key; I think.

//Edit: Oh, and of course a question is which of these options (if any) would be implementable into the source code; that'd left to be judged by the SCP staff - non-coders (like me  ) can only make suggestions what'd make sense from the user side

[Lynx]

A feature like that could be also modified to allow autotracking guns perhaps.

But I fear it will not implemented. According to the programmers the turret code is so messy that they wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.