Currently, when you change your turret loadout on the fly on a capship, your shields go down and the switched turrets are disabled for 5 minutes. This makes a very useful, cool feature nearly worthless, because you can almost always just go dock and switch loadout in about the same amount of time or less.

I propose that the timer be reduced to somewhere between 30 seconds to 1 minute, leaning towards shorter. Keeping the timer while making it much shorter still prevents mid-combat swaps while allowing the feature to be more useful.

It makes for an interesting tradeoff of risk/reward; carrying potentially expensive, heavy, and bulky turrets in your cargo is risky and potentially costly, but with the ability to switch in-flight a savvy pilot could take advantage. As-is, the feature exists but is nearly useless because of the prohibitively long timer.

-1, fighting capships could take up to 30-40mins. And allowing any kind of fast swap in between would make it harder to gauge how safe a push on it is, especially against goliaths.

Taking down your own shields and disabling your turret(s) for any amount of time during combat is a major disadvantage that heavily outweighs any advantage potentially gained by swapping. Additionally, in order to swap you need to be carrying the extra turret(s), so a cargo+addon scanner like the ones every capship are equipped with will let you know if you need to be worried about a potential swap.

If anyone is able to pull off a relevant swap in combat at all even with an extremely short timer (say 10s), that would be incredibly impressive and that pilot would deserve any edge they could get by doing that.

The intention is not to buff capship combat capabilities, just to take better advantage of an already existing feature that could save a lot of time and hassle docking with stations, as a slight tradeoff for planning ahead and risking additional turrets in your cargo.

But not every capship will always be in radar range to know that hawky

-1 I think the timer as is currently should stay. It forces a temporary withdrawal from the fight to change weapons, instead of a short period of turbo.

+1 and the radar range for seeing turrets is 1000 to 2000 ironlord. And Harpo what stoping us from turboing out for 5 mins anyway? Also 5 min is a short period of turbo. I think it should be put to 30sec to a minute. Adds more tactical processing think about it like this your changing a gun barrel in combat should you take your time to switch it out or be as quick as possible your in the middle of a active gun fight you have to be fast or die.

To say shield regen is 6min 40seconds (obtained via dming capship upon deshield) 5mins is still a very long time. Most of the time u will kill the player and deepspace for 5mins probably afk at that.

+1 anewold, especially with caprails. make some hot pockets while your high speed insta death deals with a intruder