Cylindrical things? Those would probably be the main guns; that's the front
And yeah, I know they could use some detailing. What's there is basically just placeholder geometry. The engines are the big flat dark surfaces in the rear... not to be confused with the slightly smaller dark surfaces in the front, which are where the missiles will fire from.
A little description of the armament in general:
- There are four main guns, which are forward mounted. They probably shoot some sort of particle cannon. The advantage of these is that they're powerful and can't be shot down by turrets, and their power supply (or whatever they use) can be replenished. The disadvantage is that since they're forward-mounted, you have to point your ship at the target ... a little bit in front, actually.
- There are also two banks of missiles (one on each side), which are blastier than the main guns and don't need you to point them at the target in order to track it. As a disadvantage, however, they can be shot down by turrets, and you can only launch as many missiles as you've got on-board.
- There's a torpedo/bomb bay on the underside. Torpedoes are even blastier than missiles, but they're slower and easier for turrets to detect. Not meant for use against small targets like Skirmishers
- Turrets: they shoot down missiles and torpedoes.
- Countermeasures: flares? Something to get an enemy missile to leave you alone.
At some point I'm also going to have to figure out where countermeasure launchers will go... I'm not sure if that's something that can be controlled in the FS2 engine (or whether a ship can have multiple countermeasure launch points / AI-controlled countermeasure release?) but if/when I put this into my own game, that's one thing I want.