Hey guys, I need your advice about this: since the beam cannon is the primary weapon of my ship, I'd like to add some extra protection to prevent it to be wiped out by a single shot. Here's the options I have thought about:
1- a 4 blade iris at the top of the cannon. Each blade has to pivot around the Y axis that passes through a single point (like clock's hands). I asked on the scripting section but I was told it would be difficult to implement;
2- a shield covering the "mouth" of the cannon, like fighters' one (maybe easier than the iris);
In this cases the beam emitter is assigned few hitpoints, so it can be easily destroyed after clearing the iris or weakening the shield ( or destroying an hypothetical shield generator)
3- the beam emitter subsystem is assigned more hitpoints. This is the easiest way, but the less realistic and the less interesting, in my opinion.
Do you think it would be worthy to spend time trying to make the first 2 ideas work, or I'd better to go for the third option? Do you think that this kind of extra protection would give the ship an excessive advantage over the enemies (considering GTVA as enemy)?