As the title say, allow us manually aim weapons separate from whatever the direction the ship is pointed. Have you ever noticed when auto aim is turned on, some weapons, such as the gatt II, pcb and gauss will fire in directions completely different from the where the front of the ship is pointed.

When auto aim is disengaged, the weapons just fire forward. It seems that some of these weapons are able to gimbal when the auto aim computer is engaged. But they are locked forward when the computer is disengaged. I would personally find it beneficial to be able to disengage this gimbal lock and aim the weapons separately while a/a is off.

For example, being able to lead a light target with fire while they are out maneuvering my heavier ship would be incredibly helpful. I'm sure others would also have uses for this ability.

This would be a pretty large departure from the way things have always worked..

But, if we were to do something like this, how are you proposing to control this new "turret", while also flying?

Understand that each weapon has different AA parameters, which can be very different, so you would be looking to manually control and "aim" each of your equipped weapons individually.

I agree it would be a pretty big change to the game. This was basically came out a shower storm session.

The most logical (to me) way of controlling it would be to hit a key and get manual control of cannon, sort of like mouse look. Let go of the key and the cannon would reset to the bow facing default position. That would work for a k/b mouse set up. For something joystick/gamepad , maybe a button being pressed to engage control via an analog stick.

On mobile I would be at a loss. Though with a vr headset, pressing a button then being able to aim one's head where the cannon is to aim might be an option.

This sounds like it would be a niche advancement for niche players with niche skills when a turret would suffice.