While the addition of turrets on a couple of ships is definitely a major step toward player controlled capships and the like, it seems to me that there are definitely some issues that need to be worked out with the current methods of controlling turrets. Quite frankly, it is not worth the time or effort of crawling into somebody else's moth to guard them with a single neutron blaster; the same job could be done more effectively by flying a vult or hog which has more guns, better accuracy, etc. The same problem would extend to player-controlled capships as well. It's simply not worth the effort of procuring and moving a HAC if you need dozens of players to man turrets in order to operate it effectively.

Instead of having each turret individually manned by a single gunner, it would be more effective to put a single Tactical Officer (or call him a gunner if you like) in charge of multiple turrets simultaneously. Technically, my idea of the TO interface would work as follows

Turrets would be divided into groups by section on large capships, or just be all in the same group on something like a moth.

The TO would have a viewscreen with a full range of motion (like the current turret controls, but with 360 range of motion in all directions). He would select targets and fire just like any other situation where weapons are fired in VO. When he points his viewscreen in a certain direction, all of the turrets rotate as far as they can in that direction and a display on the HUD will show which guns will actually be able to fire in the current angle. When the TO presses the trigger, only the guns actually pointing in the right direction fire.

For the purposes of functionality the TO's viewscreen should be entirely independent of ship direction; that is, if the pilot is spinning around or turning the viewscreen should stay at the same angle and the turrets should all move accordingly.

Some other thoughts:

Under this system, it would actually be worthwhile for traders to find a gunner/TO for a moth to ward off pirates, and the moth would also become an effective 2-player combat support ship in a pinch (especially with weapons other than N2 in the turrets).

Once we get PC capships, this mechanism would make it much easier to effectively man them. For example, the HAC's guns could be divided into 5 groups, making it a 6-player ship (5 gunners + pilot).

It may even be feasible to support an arbitrary number of gunners (up to the number of turrets) and allow each gunner to select his own group of turrets. For larger ships this would probably be even more effective; a lot of times in a HAC or Connie you would want to attack broadside with all available turrets on one (capship) target while a few other gunners use the turrets on the other side to shoo away bombers.

Please post any questions, comments, concerns, other ideas you may have.

A great idea IMO. Would make turrets a lot easier to use/user-friendly.

/me votes for this to go ingame

Good idea, has been suggested before (tactical display/control), still merits discussion, and IMO, implementation. It'll just take some time working out a good interface for it, I think.

Yeah, I have seen/heard some general discussion about this kind of thing before.

One idea I've heard repeatedly is for one player to have an external tactical view of the ship a la Homeworld. While this works great for strategy games I don't believe it has any place in Vendetta; we'd just play EVE if we wanted point-and-click flight or targetting mechanisms.

I haven't seen the source code for the current turret control systems (or I might be submitting a patch rather than a feature request ticket :p ), but adding something like this really shouldn't be very difficult if it is a clean implementation to begin with.

This is also more consistent with the overall style of VO than the solutions I've heard proposed previously IMHO.

I especially like the stationary view feature suggested. Excellent ideas.