Imagine this... Flying over to a couple pirate strongholds, kicking up a nest of hornets. Instead of just protecting their base, they take the offensive. The problem with this offensive is that you live in tor territory,and are on very good terms with them. After a few attacks on your base, the tor won't have any more of this, opting on ever larger attacks of their own against the pirates. Vatious factions either join a side or stay neutral (maybe even allowing player controlled factions to choose a side?), creating vast conflicts,with 50-60 ships attacking each other In epic battlrs that you could see even from planets that are close by. Heck, those planets could have spots for contributing to said war efforts, as you watch burning ships try to landz so they can be refit and go back.. Talking about an achievement! The ai involved would make coding a nightmare, but... The possibilities would get even more endless than they were before!
Your vision is so... specific, so inspired. So here's what I see: 6 ships show up for this epic battle, frames rates drop by 50% 3 more ships join in, frame rates drop to 1. "In a big enough battle the frame rates for everyone drop to zero." - Not Tyler Durden
Npc ships fighting each other actually does not cause that much lag if they are a low size class. But it you have multiple Dreadnoughts fighting yes that will.
I guess it depends mostly on the number of turrets that are actively scanning and launching things rather than specifically ship sizes/count, though I get the feeling the turret targetting is at least partly done on a per ship basis rather than by each turret as I have seen some wierd turret ranging at times.
Don't forget that the shown distance to something is based on where your camera is and not on your ship. If the camera sits 300m behind your ship it makes it look like the turrets are shooting further than they should.
The wierd ranging was in a specially setup test ranges on planet and in space that I was using to test firing lines of turrets on ships with known distance between the test target parts and the origin of the ship. Some turrets were able to vastly exceed their stated range, so long as the target structure origin was in range.
