While that is true, Arf, it's also one of the most pathetically lame weapon names this game has, applied to one of the most awesome weapons. BGTWKOA is better.

Just noting that I have been following this thread. Creating an uber-Avalon is possible, but I share the concerns of others that the defenses of Tridents are pretty limited, and they're vulnerable to groups as it is. I don't want them to be as "fragile" as fighters either. It's a major undertaking to construct a Trident, I don't think it's unreasonable that it take some effort (and maybe more than one ship) to take one down.

But, as always, open to feedback on all of that. And I expect this whole discussion to continue to change: I want to get player-capship shields going before long. But that was not as important as being able to un-dock, in my view, hence the current priorities. Shields would be a whole other set of discussion points.. you get into torpedoes to take ships out vs potential specialized weapons to drop shields, and so on.

I've also had plans to test a very-slightly-homing Avalon, for a long time, which would have a fixed speed and not-inherit firing velocity, but would avoid any issues with aim quantization.

Anyway, please continue to discuss.

That would be cool, since we can always just unset the target to revert to the current behavior (minus the leadoff indicator and distance readout).

What would be really nice is if there were some option or lua function that would let us toggle guidance on any weapons that have it, possibly based on AA state (AA on = guided, AA off = dumbfire).

Although I don't know if I'd use it (I struggle to hit a completely stationary roid with avalons sometimes!) I like the concept of being able to switch homing on/off.
I can imagine (especially if it works in flight) the defensive capabilities of firing off a batch of unguided swarms that don't give off the warning beep until the tracking is enabled and they get missile lock about 500m from the target... if nothing else it would give the missile-lock beep more urgency if it started instantly at a high speed.

My suggestion is partly keeping in mind a future where players can build versions of all the capships in game now. In that universe, a Trident should be pretty weak, though I'd still like to see the turret blind spots improved and some better offensive/defensive capabilities versus fighters. A single bomber should be able to take down the weakest capship. One bomber should probably do little more than annoy the captain of a Constellation, and attacking a HAC should come with a high probability of death.

Looking at the bigger picture, one thing that's generally not fun about VO is that its game mechanics rarely make fighting the best way to survive an encounter. It's almost always to one's advantage if one's goal is anything other than "destroy this particular enemy" to run away. Seeing the other guy go boom is almost always more fun than getting away. In this particular case, that probably means we need better bomber weapons *and* anti-bomber weapons.

If rockets and missiles could be targeted and destroyed you wouldn't necessarily need a special class of anti-bomber weapons.

I've also had plans to test a very-slightly-homing Avalon, for a long time, which would have a fixed speed and not-inherit firing velocity, but would avoid any issues with aim quantization.

The problem with fixed speed missiles is that any ship (including Tridents) can totally avoid them simply by turboing. That's actually one of Avalons' stronger points. Since you've got control over their velocity, you can time exactly when you want them to hit your target. With the other missiles, you fire them when they'll hit because it's always the same.

The Gemini turrets we have on current Tridents are a great example of that. Consider the situation where two Tridents are fighting. All you have to do to win this fight is get in front and turbo around. That'll put you in a position where your weapons hit the other ship but theirs can't.

I think y'all need to stop hemming and hawwing about tridents needing to be killable. Once they have shields I think it's safe to say they will be as easy to kill as an npc trident (which is also not easy if they are on the move -- i.e. convoy tridents).

On the flip side an anti-capship weapon that is expensive and requires some skill to use should be made available. Some kind of one or two shot munition with slow homing capabilities. But it shouldn't allow a player to solo a TTM. Killing TTMs should be group activities under normal circumstances.

I think making a slow-homing avalon would have many other applications outside of killing TTMs.

"A single bomber should be able to take down the weakest capship." No, tridents aren't speedboats. They should be able to take on at least 2-3 bombers.

The appropriate defense for a capship against bombers is to blast them out of space with turret fire, not outrun them. If a capship with a full complement of turret gunners can't blast bombers out of space semi-reliably given an appropriate level of skill on the part of the gunners, THAT is broken and ought to get fixed as well.

I'm willing to accept that the only reasonable answer at this point might be to leave things as they are until the devs can work on a set of synergistic improvements aimed at making capship-bomber interactions more about making stuff explode than running away.

yeah capship turrets need to be deadly even to vets... currently they are not