The turrets are in some situations rather clunky, some features i feel are really needed: - change target preference in a better way than goint thru the ship menu and devices. (like hotkey and popup menu) - have a key for setting a target ship prime target. - have a way to manually aim all turrets at the croshair and fire them without the ai targeting. (acting like fixed weapons) - make them only atack turrests in line of sight and also the anti personal ones, generators and warpdrive are fair game for sensing thru armor i think.
This intrigues me. This is how I think a feature like this would work; hopefully it is also what you had in mind. 1. Pilot places reticule on target (vessel, structure, drone, NPC, possibly even terrain). 2. Pilot presses a key/button to mark the target as a prime or primary target. 3. All players seated in the same ship will have a HUD marker indicating the position of the primary target. This marker can be seen with external camera view and while manually controlling a turret. 4. All AI controlled turrets will fire on the primary target if it is permitted by its device properties. So sentry turrets set to Player/Drone/NPC only will not fire on a CV primary target. Additionally, they will still target only the devices allowed by their properties. I'm still not sure how an AI controlled turret should behave when the primary target is valid but not visible within the angle of attack. Should the turret fire on other valid targets? Should it still attempt to track the primary target so that it will be ready as soon as it becomes visible? While this is great to coordinate multiple players on one ship (always great to have something for passengers to do), I wonder how a feature like this could help coordinate a squadron of SVs. Perhaps the HUD marker could be made visible to other faction members in the same playfield, or perhaps only if they are within detector range. That could be hard to make sense of though if there are many faction members and each one is marking a primary target for their own turrets. Hmm, this could even be useful outside of a vessel. Clearing a POI on foot with friends could benefit from being able to mark spotted NPCs or drones. Marking which exact defense tower among the cluster is being targeted so that a friendly could strafe it with their vessel. This would be a great way to enhance effective communication in a team. Food for thought.
Turrets (and fixed weapons) need to be assignable to "weapon groups" that can be selected in the ready bar. Alternatively / as-well-as they need to have targets assignable to keys in the ready bar - e.g. turrets / generators / thrusters / etc. As a reference, Space Engineers has a very good system for doing this.
