Allow "weapon convergence distance" to be adjusted in outfitting screen for fixed weapons

[Screemonster]

For the tl;dr version of this, see the wiki article on Gun Harmonisation. The suggestion essentially amounts to "put this in the game, it's been a part of aerial combat since ww2 so there's no reason why people in the 3300s should have forgotten how to do it".

Basically, it'd be a simple slider somewhere allowing you to set a focal range/point for any fixed weapons you happen to have mounted on your ship, with "infinity" as the default (ie, firing directly forward and never converging) and the minimum being however close the weapon can aim at without hitting your own ship. When you fire the weapons, they travel on a line that takes them directly through an imaginary point directly ahead of your ship at the specified range, allowing for tighter grouping with ships that otherwise have poor weapon placement provided you engage at the specified distance (likewise, engaging at the wrong range will lead to your shots going wide - if you set your lasers to converge at 600m, then at 2km you'll have trouble hitting a barn door)

Yes, this would be a massive buff for ships with notoriously bad placement for fixed weapons such as the clipper and type 10. Yes, the FDL with its already-prettty-good grouping won't see as much benefit. The sights for fixed weapons are already capable of adjusting for range, we see this whenever you get particularly close to a target and the sights move out to represent where exactly they'll hit.

 

[lenna]

Calibration of weapons is normally done by adjusting sighting, in some cases they may be able to also tweak the orientation of the barrel mounting but there are bound to be limits to what can be done... especially if the weapons themselves are on notionally fixed mounts and are retractable.

In the context of ED, we have gimballed and turreted weapons which can help with improving convergence due to their mountings having a greater degree of flexibility.

I have a counter suggestion... allow tracking to be turned off for both gimballed and turreted weapons and when it is turned off they work in bore sight mode rather than fixed (i.e. they align to the centre of the sight reticule rather than just fire forward). Maybe allow the bore sight range of the reticule to also be configured but I would see that as almost a moot capability.

I certainly disagree with the principle of being able to tweak fixed mount weapon alignment like you seemingly want them to be.

 

[Screemonster]

Except that doesn't help with things like gauss weapons, which is kind of the point. Gimballed weapons already converge wherever you need them to, the only reason you'd ever want to use them on boresight mode is if your target is chaffing.

 

[Decksmeck]

If they did that, there might need to be a slider on every weapon. That way, with ships that have many weapons, you could setup multiple convergence points at different ranges.

 

[Bigmaec]

Oh I would sooo love this on the Mamba and Corvette

 

[Screemonster]

If they did that, there might need to be a slider on every weapon. That way, with ships that have many weapons, you could setup multiple convergence points at different ranges.

Yep. I mainly posted this because of a discussion about how some ships are unviable for taking down interceptors due to poor hardpoint convergence for gauss, and if you were fighting interceptors you'd definitely want your gauss to converge at a sweet spot around 1.5km while leaving your flak set to fire dead-ahead.