In my experience with Capital Class vessels, there's a severe problem with the under/overpoweredness of the creatures.

I wonder if that might not be alleviated by, instead of having each turret target a closest enemy, having the ship form a firing solution based on the densest cluster of nearby enemies. The ship rotates to bring the batteries to bear, and they fire, not all right at the target, but with a spread around the target. This could conceivably drastically improve their performance at long range, while creating a weakness for decoys which could get fighters into close range.

Follow-up:

The idea here is that having a capital vessel with point defense turrets, each firing at their closest target is not really the best way to build one. After all, that's what fighters are for. What capital vessels can theoretically do, that no other ship can, is to fire a number of turrets in a pattern which allows them to account for a large spread of possible escape routes of the targeted vessel.

Let our capital class vessel in this case be a HAC. Reposition all the turrets to the front bow. That's a battery of 40 weapons with say a solid angle of 2*pi*(1-cos(30 degrees)) = ~ pi/2 steradians. Then the HAC at any given time can aim at 1/8th of the sky around it. The rotation speed of the ship then governs how quickly it can be brought to bear on a new target. If the ship can do one full revolution over 10 seconds, then this means that if the ship is pincered, it could take a full 5 seconds to come to bear on a new target, for a ship traveling at 200 m/s this allows small vessels to get 1000 m closer to a HAC before it could take them out, plenty of room to get close enough that the HAC would be unable to line them up at all.

Suppose we have a ragnarok at 600m that the HAC is targetting, if each weapon on the HAC fires at 200 m/s, this means that it will take 3 seconds for the burst of fire from the batteries to reach the rag. This rag might move in any direction to avoid the blast.

the HAC leads the target, based on it's current velocity (AKA, Autoaim), but instead of sending all of its fire to that location, it sends it around that location. The densest region is the most likely location after 3 seconds, but it coordinates its fire to a number of other locations based on the probability of the ship reaching that destination.

The easiest case is that of a Rag standing still at 600 m. In this case, the probability distribution is a perfect sphere around the rag, with a radius of 120 m/s * 3 seconds or 360 m,

the probability solution then takes the form of a 3 dimensional normal around the ship:

a random number is then rolled and the radius from the center for each turret is picked.

All angles inside the solid angle are equally likely and so for each turret, an angle is chosen at random.

By "coating" the sky with this, it becomes very difficult to solo and avoid a straight-on shot from a HAC, and yet, it's not overpowered because it really becomes damaging to larger ships with a smaller space over which the fire is spread.

Small fighters would have such a wide radius that the space in-between shots would be quite large, and a decent pilot might be able to weave through them. Slower bombing vessels and other capital vessels need to try to get the HAC out of position so that they can charge.

EDIT: This also drastically changes what it means to be a "gunner" on a Capital vessel. Instead of firing a weapon, the gunnery screen would give a view from the center of the battery. A gunner would then select the target location, and the size of the spread. (If there's no gunner, this would be done according to the above algorithm, a human gunner's intuition might be better though)

@BlackSands:

How about adding onto the current capital class vessel point-defense-system (PDS) with port and starboard anti-capital class batteries of a half-dozen or more. Also, to be included with your firing solution scheme.

It's a reasonable design, from my point-of-view, to have both PDS and anti-capital class batteries; of course, that is if you're aiming for capital class vessels to be more effective in the destruction of fighters, bombers, and other capital class vessels.

However, there may be a desired limit to the effectiveness of this suggestion and perhaps my above input is beyond that limit.

It's been done before with real world accounts, such as battleships of World War II to the present.

If you want something to do something, should it do it effectively?

That's a possibility too, my only concern would be that the point defense weapons should be weakened and reduced in number if the ship is getting that much more firepower.

My idea for the batteries is that they would not be just anti-Capital class, the design of the batteries should mean that Capital class vessel should also be able to have good chances to take out small ships at a range of <600 m IF they can line up the batteries.

Unlike real life, there's no limit on how much firepower you can put on a HAC, so it's very difficult to say what would be a realistic set of countermeasures.

I think some small point defense systems might be nice, particularly close to the docking/undocking points. But as has been true with every comic book character, weaknesses are what make things interesting... (Which is, btw, why superman sucks. He has only one weakness! and so every story is about Kryptonite.)

"Reposition all the turrets to the front bow."

I may of missed something but would this not make capitol class ships even more useless, ineffective and defenseless than they already are?

Actually, that could make cappies able to effectively engage in combat with other cappies. Assuming of course that they don't just sit still a few thousand meters out of firing range.

It would however also leave a massive and completely unrealistic blind spot which would be totally defenseless to anything attacking from behind.

Honestly, this sounds more like a nerf than an improvement. cappies are fine having the field of fire that they currently have... except the Trident, which I do not consider to be cappie anyways.

I'm pretty sure he was using that as an example, as it is much easier to talk about spread and angles when all the guns are in the same spot.

Yes, I was using it as an example,

Ideally, you want to keep a blind spot, but not one that large. Having a bit of a blind spot encourages gameplay. I think the ship should have 2-3 batteries, a large one along front. another one on the Fin, and a small one on the back.