Changelog:
- New weapon: the Shield Turret. This defensive weapon may be equipped only to vessels with Turrets (Atlas, Behemoth), and fires a small shielded area to deflect incoming fire. Available in Odia M14 (expensive) or the UIT Capitol stations (much more cheaply).
- "Next Border Engagements" mission indicates when the next set of Dynamic Warfare missions will start, and what size the will be.
- Fixed crashing bug when logging off with a damaged Atlas ship.
- Fixed lua error when logged in and a character hasn't been chosen yet and a Border Skirmish sector was conquered at the same time.

Also upgraded mysql and did some database maintenance, which was the reason for the somewhat longer downtime for this release.

I'll be interested to see how people do with the shield turret. It's not quite the weapon I wanted to create, but it's pretty interesting anyway. We have some modifications planned for next week, but I look forward to some usage feedback. I can foresee people doing things like.. running the Border Turret gauntlet and such, using them.

The new weapon is not very polished. It has no real effect, looks a little weird, and I'm sure it'll need tweaking and changing. So please keep the input positive. I could have held back until I had more time to work on it, but I chose to "get it out there", so you all could experiment and give me added feedback.

Awesome, Inc. I haven't had a chance to try the shield turret yet, but I should get around to it today. I like that you just threw it in though. It'll give us something to play with and we can help you tweak it. You should make a habit of throwing in random experimental toys like that. We like playing with cool new stuff.

Wow... Um... Okay... SHIELD turret? I don't even KNOW what to think about that!

I almost wonder if "energy focus" would have been the appropriate term for the Shield-Turret (given the back-story, et al)?

That is an impressive Point defense weapon, I assume/hope it has a significant delay between refire like at least 1 second so that these ships aren't completely invincible

Now we need a way to recruit gunners. Most pilots want to pilot and stopping strangers in space to ask “do you want to be my gunner” lacks a certain something.

One way would be to have a recurring “mission” that matched gunners with people looking for gunners. It could be like an employment agency, charge the pilot a set fee and pay the gunner not only in money but in heavy weapons experience points as well as cash rewards from the faction for any attackers killed.

Another approach would allow the pilot to hit the turbo lock and then go back and man the guns himself.

I like the last line of your post, it is very WC Privateer-esque, turbo lock optional however

Yep, toggling between pilot and gunner position seems like a good idea.

So does the gunner recruiting, unfortunately the player base is too small for that system, it wouldn't be efficient.

Tested the turrets, from gunner, pilot and attacker perspective. They seem to work well, but might take some training to use right. The shield portions look a bit odd at first, but once you get used to them, they are quite normal. The sound for the shield gun rocks.

I'd appreciate being able to switch to one's own turrets, as well. The pilot/gunner matching sounds nice, but would probably only work with a sufficient number of players.

Also, an external view, like for the pilots, should be available to the gunner to be able to assess the situation from not only his own POV.

I think that everyone is right about the number of players needed to make gunner recruiting efficient, unfortunately that also applies to having gunners at all. Once a player becomes experienced enough to have a ship with turrets he most likely does not want to be someone else’s gunner.

How about making it an entry level mission? In order to get you “ticket punched” to get a heavy weapons license you need to log a few missions as a gunner?

Or one could make it simply a “quicker” way to get heavy weapon experience so that new players, who are anxious to try everything, will “sign up” for the experience points and for a tour of gray space with a more experienced player at the controls.

Whatever we come up with we need some more efficient way to get butts into the gunner seats, or why bother having the turrets in the first place?

I'd be a gunner, who wouldnt want to cruise around and be paid for nothing while i watch a movie on tv and occasionally have to hold off bots in an ION storm!

However I will also shoot at pirates to invite chase, so hirers beware

yes, and "do you want to man my turret" also sounds strange...

Climb aboard my gun turret and we'll fire off a couple shots

Noticed a crazy wingbugging event on the turrets when fired at the rear of an atlas X..

Otherwise, YAY! Cool stuff. The sheild gun sound IS awesome.
+10 devs

Awesome, you almost made a smoke trail gun! Could you make the smoke last for longer so people can do cool astrobatic shows with it? Different colours?

the shield gun is fun. it adds something entirely new to combat and doesn't seem to be, in nature, either useless or overpowered.

cheers.

mdaniel, You're not being PC.
It needs to be "Do you want to person my turret".

Or more seriously "Do you want to be my gunner"

What about this:

Command for Player 1:
/turret invite "Player 2"

Player 2 Sees:
<Player 1> Requests Assistance Manning His Ship. Type /turret Accept to become a Turret Gunner.

Note: I would say that "Ship" could be replaced with the type of vessel it is (ie: Behemoth, Atlas) to better clue the invited pilot to the risks.

(temporary) solution to find more gunners: let all existing account owners (or just the previously payed account owners) to login (even if they are not current subscribers) but limit their play to mounting only turrets.

This way the players that are payed subscribers get a boost to their game-play but also players that are staying "on-hold" will get a chance to see how the game progressed and (why not) resubscribe.

(I have a good track of similar ideas that were embraced by the devs so this one might also have a chance, although this time it would required some additional coding.)