Proposal:
- Make turrets do their best to stay as close to on-target as possible.
- For instance, if the target is behind you but drops below the "horizon" the turret is capable of aiming at, turrets will currently go back to their forward-facing neutral position. This leads to very irritating behavior when a target is constantly "bobbing" in and out of the turret's field of view, causing the turret to keep alternating between trying to swing to the target, and trying to swing back to its "home" position.
- Instead, the turret should just get as close as it can to the target, such that as soon as the target comes back into the turret's field of view, it's already where it needs to be and can resume firing.
- Remove the 5-degree-down limitation from turrets, and allow them to see "down" just as much as a gimballed weapon would in that hardpoint
- Turrets already are trading substantial DPS for the ability to aim in a wider cone. It has never made much sense to me from either a balance or lore standpoint that turrets, mounting the gun on this big articulated arm, would not be able to aim "down" as much as a gimballed weapon. It makes more sense to me to have a smooth progression of Fixed (only straight forward)-> Fixed + gimballed firing arc, at the cost of DPS - > gimballed + turret firing arc, at the cost of more DPS.
- Adjust turret confusion to build in a more intuitive way (from the perspective of the turret user)
- Right now, turret confusion is built using complicated math trying to calculate the relative acceleration of the target to the turret user. This approach makes sense, but leads to some strange and frustrating situations from the user's perspective.
- Instead, I suggest the following approach: record the angle the turret is attempting to aim at (where the target is for lasers, or where the lead pip is for projectile weapons), and save the last few seconds of that data. Average the numbers together, and look at the standard deviation. High standard deviation indicates there have been a lot of significant changes in that angle, while a low standard deviation would indicate the turret hasn't had to adjust its aim much. If the standard deviation is above a certain threshold, increase turret confusion. If it's below the threshold, decrease it.
- Make turret confusion increase the amount of "wobble", instead of making the turrets trail "behind" the target
- Allows a confused turret to still get some hits, instead of "reliably missing" by firing behind the target. It would be similar to how gimbals can still hit things that have used chaff, just with a lower percentage.
- Nothing annoys me more than pointing right at the target, and watching my turrets fail to fire because they're attempting to trail behind the target, but that trailing point is too low for them to aim and fire on.
- A turret with low confusion (i.e. held fairly steady, or aiming at a static target) would have very little wobble. If the turret isn't having to adjust its aim much to keep hitting, then it should be perfectly content to just sit still and keep hitting.
- As confusion builds, the wobble would get to look more like a gimballed weapon, then go beyond that at extreme levels. It would look as though the turret is struggling to accurately determine the target's position, and searching for it. At high levels, the wobble should be somewhere in the vicinity of like, a quarter as bad as it is one a gimballed weapon looking at a chaffing target. Chaff would cause the turret to wobble just as much as it does for a gimballed weapon. Yay consistency!
