[Marcov]

Hello, people. Since I just started playing Freespace 2 for like a month, you may notice I'm still a beginner (though I finished the main campaign already). Anyways, I've kept on developing missions involving you driving a capital ship. Well, a few things I've noticed:

1. The larger your ship is, the more likely the game will crash (e.g. I drove a Leviathan without any errors, but with the Lucifer or the Colossus, almost instant crash).

2. You can't fire any weapons (though I tried to fire beams myself via the Events editor).

3. Caps are extremely slow!! And you can't warp out because you're less than 40 km/h.

4. Since caps are huge ships, zooming in and out is rather difficult.

Anyway, I'd really like to solve the problem of having to fire weapons using events. What's the point? You don't even get kills. I wish my turrets were just automatic (lol though). And enough crashing. And of course, I wish I could finally warp out my ship.

Any tips??

[The E]

Well..... To be honest, flying capships has been attempted a few times, but so far not with great success. As you yourself noticed, it's pretty damn hard to make it all work, and takes a bit of tbl editing to make work.
The largest ship that is flyable for players so far is the WhiteStar from the Babylon Project, you might want to take a look at what they did to make that work (The ship has no turrets, though, and thus handles more like an oversized fighter).

[Dragon]

I managed to achieve it on my warship (1000m), but I got stuck on age-old beam issue (you can "overcharge" any beam which have $fire wait: larger than certain time, IIRC it was 5).
Also, you get kills form your turrets, but it's anouther beam issue (already solved, but you must enable the fix) that prevents scoring kills even with primary mounted beams (not only for you, other ships also don't get them).
I had experienced crashes you described and FS2 Open already fixed them (I once flew Lucifer sized Warcruiser, completely without problems).
I can do fully functional capship flying for non-beam ship, it requires some heavy modding and a couple of FREDed procedures, PM me if you want more info.
Alternatively, you may try this: http://freespacemods.net/download.php?view.524
It's a campaign demo with bonus capship flying single mission (you get to pilot Fenris there), I don't know who's the author, but he's cetrainly a FRED master, as he managed to make capship flying possible on FS2 Retail, when others couldn't do it in FS2 Open (though if you will look into mission, it doesn't seem that difficult).
This demo should function on FS2 Retail, but I had also played it on FS2 Open with mediavps.

[Hades]

-snip-

It's by Mustang19, it says so in the campaign description in the campaign selection screen.

[Dragon]

Thanks, I had added a comment with this information.
I wonder why I never heard of him, he should be famous at least for making capship flying possible in retail.

[S-99]

You can fire weapons as a capship. Reminds me of a tiny experiment i downloaded years ago from here where you got to fly a deimos defending a knossos.

It was very simplistic. You could activate and deactivate your beams, you couldn't do the same for blobs and and flak (you're turrets fired when you targetted a hostile).

It was like flying a fighter, but then, as is the crutch with most few people who fly a capship in game...they do it wrong. Capships engage targets very differently from fighters and bombers. Generally with a capship i pick a vector and use POV buttons to look around my vessel picking out smaller targets harassing me and turn on my big beams for bigger stuff. Then i pick another vector and follow it. Playing as a capship in 3rd person view works great too.

I forget what it was called, and warping out i don't think happened in the same fashion for fighters warping out at all.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

You can fire weapons as a capship. Reminds me of a tiny experiment i downloaded years ago from here where you got to fly a deimos defending a knossos.

Hey, I think I recall seeing that mission too, although I never got around to playing it myself. Did the description for that begin with something along the lines of "In this mission, you're not Alpha, you're not Beta, but you're flying a corvette..."?

[S-99]

It was really fun and totally doable. Whoever did it focussed a lot on simplicity. It would've been fun had the weapons systems been more complicated.

On the brightside, when flying as a capship you can mess around with your energy settings for guns and engines.

You can also baseball bat whatever the hell you want. That mission was basically what i consider a successful test. Going up against fighters that moved around at like 40m/s and stuff like that