Outfitting screen convergence adjustment

[Psieonic]

Please, yes. The fact some ships have hard-points further apart from each other than the size of the ships they're fighting means it's just absurd not to have at LEAST a standardised convergence point. Ideally, all fixed weapons should have dynamic convergence point based on the current target's distance. They're still not gimballed weapons and don't do target tracking, but automatic convergence point adjustment based on the known distance of the target really shouldn't be such a difficult problem to solve in an age of magical hyperspace drives and shields.

 

[JRok]

Fixed weapons have been frustrating from the beginning. I understand why they exist, and why they are the way they are, but even in real life there is "convergence". I've noticed that some fixed weapons will move their aim-point a tiny bit, especially when a subsystem is targeted, but this only really helps with very small ships; on larger ships, the weapons are simply too far apart for it, which means hitting smaller ships with two weapons is difficult; hitting subsystems with more than one simply does not happen.

What I would like to see is a variety of options in the outfitting screen to adjust the aimpoints on fixed weapons. For example, a pilot of an Imperial Clipper would be able to adjust the aimpoints on a pair of fixed beam lasers on his wingtips inward to compensate for the extreme difficulty a Clipper is notorious for when it comes to hitting any target with more than one of its weapons; someone who was frustrated with his Eagle's difficulty in hitting subsystems with all three weapons could angle his dorsal mount down just a fraction of a degree; someone who wanted to mount quad pulse lasers on his Fer-de-Lance could have them adjusted in so that they all met at a point exactly 2km from his ship.

Setting the convergence on electrically-controlled weapons has been an issue for the air forces of the real world since just after the first World War; in our world, of course, this is something that military command organizations decide for all their pilots at once, but it makes sense that in a galaxy full of armed, privately-owned starships, any individual pilot mounting fixed weapons would be able to have the adjustments done to his own personal specifications. For an appropriate labor charge, naturally.

I agree... long overdue.

 

[space pilot]

I just got a Cobra Mk. III and moved the fixed pulse lasers to the outer small hardpoints, which of course meant only one was probably going to hit a small ship at a time.

So harmonisation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_harmonisation) would be great. I wouldn't mind if it were set in a menu or adjustable on the fly. Either is perfectly realistic, it would just amount to adjusting set-screws, which could be done via an electric motor.