Yeah I wanted a turret, how about you READ the OP I made? I kind of DISTINCTLY said MULTICREW, which would give my friend a gun to shoot, I know reading is difficult and all but still.
WHY are turrets so stupidly expensive?
- Thread starter Vahnkiljoy
- Start date
They are not stupidly expensive.
Turrets have the same arcs of fire in multicrew. However, they track faster, have no wobble, and have fewer counters.
I see it as a residual, left over from the days when turreted weapons were deadly and keep fire on target almost constantly. With the intro of chaff spamming NPCs and what seems like borderline chaff level dithering, they are more of a liability now (hitting friendlies) than an asset. I avoid them.
Just another example of a credit sink that got nerfed into being almost useless.
Just another example of a credit sink that got nerfed into being almost useless.
Nice pick up - I didn't read that far
OP, turrets are more expensive because they have built-in AI that fires them guns for you and are smart enough not to hit a clean ship, plus they don't consume as much power as their gimbaled or fixed cousins. When you become a top gun pilot and engineer them, you will find gimballed or fixed weapons much better
Ah, but a bullet from a Phalanx hurts just as much as a bullet from AA gun. While turrets in Elite are made significantly weaker AND useless, due to FF even dangerous to the user, with chaff. This is why their price really is weird.Let's think about this...
A 20mm anti-aircraft gun costs around $40,000
A 20mm Phalanx CIWS costs around $6,000,000
The CIWS costs 150x what a manually-operated anti-aircraft gun costs.
In ED, a C3 Multi Cannon costs around Cr600k while a similar turret costs Cr3.8m.
The turret costs 6x what a manually-operated Multi Cannon costs.
Seems like a bargain to me.
That's more of an issue related to how differences are represented rather that an "imbalance".
In real life, the range of the CIWS is limited to around 2 miles due to software constraints whereas a regular AA gun has a range of approximately 5 miles.
I guess FDev might, with an eye on realism, have implemented similar compromises with turrets but, again, I suspect they might have considered that'd make turrets OP for the majority of their use so they went with weaker hits instead.
As a rule, I would prefer it if game dev's applied more understanding of real weapons to video games and then found alternative ways to define compromises.
When I see a game which has, for example, an AI L96 being the ultimate "sniper rifle" while a HK G3 is a poor substitute it always makes me cringe a bit.
Sure, an L96 is probably a bit more accurate due to it's construction and it'll have a slightly higher muzzle velocity due to not needing a gas-system to cycle the bolt but the differences won't be significant.
Having said that, it's not completely unrealistic that weapons sharing the same ammunition could have significantly different characteristics.
A conventional weapon, which simply chambers a round and fires it when you pull a trigger can apply the full force of the charge in the cartridge and it's simply be up to the operator to oversee the condition of the weapon.
Conversely, a fancy "turret" might be intended for extended periods of continuous fire and might be fitted with a water-jacket and feature an adaptive gas system which vents a percentage of the charge in order to maintain a safe operating temperature.
It's not something we currently need to do because on the ground an operator can monitor the temperature of a weapon and, in the case of a support weapon, the operator can usually just fit a new barrel when a weapon overheats while, on aircraft, air-cooling is sufficient to ensure a weapon rarely overheats.
In space, though, who knows?
Holy heck do people still believe and even spread that?
Was going to comment on this.
I recall Sandro specifically said, on here, that turrets should not, ever, cause damage to unintended targets and that if they do we should bug-report it.
Not sure if the turrets are actually smart enough to stop firing when they're going to hit an unintended target or whether the game simply ignores it when they do hit an unintended target but, in either case, apparently we should never be penalised as a result of a turret hitting an unintended target.
Damn, after years of playing... Thank you, useful info.