[mjn.mixael]

So.. I'm working on the construction drone from the Colossus cutscene. I have the model finished and mapped. I'm trying to get the 'head' to be a turret that will fire a custom beam weapon (in progress). Till then I've just been testing with just about any kind of retail turret weapon and nothing seems to work.

Here's the model/maps and a test mission.

Any help?

[attachment deleted by ninja]

[Droid803]

You're going to need to set FVEC and UVEC on a turret like that.
Without it FSO only knows how to handle turrets which rotate along the base and barrels point straight up.

I have no clue what a good FVEC and UVEC for a turret set up like that would be though.

In fact I think its impossible because its set up like the base and arm rotate along the same axis (across the ship)...which is impossible to my knowledge. They have to rotate in orthogonal directions.

[mjn.mixael]

Any documentation anywhere that would help me calculate those values?

I set it up as a single part using just the 'head' and it still didn't work...

I have half a mind to just give up on this damned thing.

EDIT: Actually yeah... I've no patience left for this... if anyone gets the turret working (and preferably one on each hand too), I'd be grateful... cause I can't deal with this anymore. Perhaps I'll come back to it some other day..

[FreeSpaceFreak]

Like Droid said, there's no support in FS for turrets with two parallel rotation axes, only perpendicular. Hence, getting the turret "arm" to work will be quite hard (except perhaps sort of with the animation code).

So let's assume we move just the head for now. However, turrets with only one rotation axis are also unsupported in FS - it's either no rotation, or two-axis rotation. However, you could set it up as a multipart and constrain rotation along one axis to the minimum; there's no reason why that shouldn't work (in fact, I've made a similar turret setup for the Satyr last week). See here.

For this case, I'd suggest you make the turret a regular up-facing multipart (the "arm" will be the turret base, the "head" the turret arm, as they are now - but the head needs to be rotated to point straight up) with a $Turret Base FOV of 0, then use turret FOV (can be larger than 180 deg) in combination with $Maximum Barrel Elevation to constrain the rotation of the head. Lastly, put an initial rotation in ships.tbl (see MVP Orion) to default the head to the correct position.

Nice work, by the way