Weapon Mounts

I didn't checked stock, but in BM ship mounts makes weapon eg. 1.5 bigger, but more than 1.5 times stronger (depends on level) and as more expensive as stronger.
So you can put more money in weapons in same ship so you save resources becose you don't need to build more engines, bridges... (if you had more ships instead of bigger weapons).

And gameplay wise ship mount should not give range (or should give less) than mounts for stationar targets. Ship can go inside range of stelite if sat have bigger range, but if its oposite, satelite would never shoot.

And in your situation: What about using APBs if you don't want to be outranged by them.
(if you can outtech them and have better engines (and you have shilds with regenerators) you can go in, damage them and go out).

btw. if ship mount gave range, APB with mount would outrange Meson with mount.

make a backup of this file : YourInstallPath\Data\ComponentEnhancements.txt
open the original file. scan down to the mount you want to mod.

Add 1 to the Number Of Abilities amount for the mount you want to add a range bonus to. Paste this lot into the entry after the other ability type entries and modify x to be 1 greater than previous ability type number. Adjust y to be the bonus you want on the range (25% boost would be 25).

Ability x Type := Component - Weapon Range
Ability x Description := Improves range of weapon by [%Amount1%] ls.
Ability x Scope := Space Object
Ability x Range Formula := 0
Ability x Amount 1 Formula := y
Ability x Amount 2 Formula := 0

The other entries in the file are self explanitory, so modding the damage down and the accuracy up shouldn't pose a problem.

.......................
I thunk therefore i wuz.

Go try out IRM I suggest. Mounts are done differently there. On a related note, I consider stock's weapon damages to be waaaaay overpowered and unbalanced.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

IMO, ship weapon mounts (at least the large ones) should increase weapon range.

Larger weapon mounts can only be fitted into BIG ships. And big ships are slow, very slow. And very easy to hit. So, in combat, all advance goes to frigates: They are harder to hit, and they can use speed in their advantage.

A fast frigate can flee if outpowered by bigger ships. And it can flee if seriously damaged. It can shot from maximun weapons range, and run away. A big ship can´t.

So increasing the range for large ship weapon mounts should give them a way to counter this. OK, frigates are faster, but baseships can shot them while fleeing.

In any case, just a thought: Baseships and frigates use the same weapons. Only difference is that weapon mounts make more damage(but you can put more frigates on the other side to counter this). Were are the megaweapons designed for huge ships? Were is the Death Star Beam?

Right now, a baseship is just a bigger, slower and less efficient frigate, equipped with the same weapons and the same components. So, why use it?

See IRM for a real difference between big and small ships. In stock, a Frigate can get so big you don't ever need to build huge ships. BM at least limits this slightly.

Ideally though, I'd want the Units bugs to be fixed before I consider using big ships creatively. Even then, I'd only think of having 1 or 2 big ships for every 10~15 smaller ships (Frigates and Light Cruisers). Having an entire fleet of nothing but big ships is inefficient.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go here if interested . No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE V bug fixing.

My concept of using Capital Ships is they fire over the small guys, not wade into the battle. They only get into it when their little guys are gone. That said, they need increased range. Otherwise they end up just using missles.

A capital ship mount could increase range, unfortuanatly you can't have the fire rate decrease (bigger and slower), but effecting the fire rate would be exactly what is needed.

heavier farther punch but fewer of them.

SEV, more than a feeling.

I agree.

I miss "heavy artillery" weapons for capital ships, huge weapons (300KT or more) able to shot at 250+ range and with reload times of 10+ seconds.

It can be Moded to work like that I think. Its also posible to reduce the accuracy of these capital weapons which would mean they cant easly hit small and nimble ships meaning the capital ships would have to carry some weaker secondary weapons to deal with them.

I'm gonna guess that you mean like a WWII battleship... Well balanced at handling multiple threat types...(excluding subs)

More or less

I completely agree. You just said what I wanted to say.

Actually todays capital ships are quite fast, and nimble. And personally, while I agree with your points the game does reflect dreadhought turn speeds very well.

As for weapon mounts I believe that they should be used to improve accurancy not range.

i like the way mounts are right now.
stock 1.58

The main complaint with mounts I have are few.

1: Satellites and Weapon Platforms can get good damage/range bonuses for mounts when compared to their size, while ships get no range bonuses, and satellites get a better range bonus than WPs and bases.

2: There are no 'mounts' for seeker weapons.
Games like Master of Orion 2 had options to increase the punch of missiles and torpedoes, be it with multiple warhead missiles, or 'overloaded' torpedoes.

3: The accuracy bonus... excuse me? The bigger a gun is, the harder it is to aim it. Just look at modern ships, you get something like a 5in cannon, and it can turn the turret rather fast while a 16in cannon takes several times longer to bring the guns to bear.
Weapon mounts should also penalize what they can shoot at. Heavy and Massive mounts should be incapable of shooting at smaller moving targets such as fighters and drones, although a satellite is still shootable since it cannot evade the shots.
Seriously, look at a 16in cannon turret and tell me how it's going to hit any sort of moving target that isn't the size of a ship and which is going someplace with any sort of speed.
Unless you got some sort of beam weapon that fires some beam much wider than the gun, then chances are even they aren't going to get much of an accuracy bonus due to a wider beam, because at any range past a few km, a few dozen meters of beam width aren't going to have an noticable effect on accuracy.
It's like comparing a dart from a dart board with a lawn dart. Just because the lawn dart is bigger, doesn't mean it's going to an easier time striking the bullseye on a dart board.

One weapon mount type I would like to see, a 'spinal mount', one so large you could only effectively fit one of them into a smaller ship, and not many more on the biggest of ships.
Games like Homeworld had small ships (Ion Beam Frigates, iirc) that were practically nothing more than a ship built around a big gun.
SE V could use something like that, and one attribute of the mount would be that it could only fire 'forward', along with the inability to shoot fighters, or else a penalty to shoot small targets since the entire ship has to be aimed in order to point the gun at a target.

Another nifty idea for a mount type, would be a 'mini-mount', reducing the size, damage and range of a weapon, but giving it a good acuracy bonus (a small weapon in a 'fast tracking' turret akin to small AA guns) and the ability to target fighters, drones and sats, even if the base weapon normally cannot.
It would make things interesting.
Another interesting thing would be applying it to seeker weapons and also adding a speed bonus to seekers, to turn the big bad CSM into a smaller, faster, missile that can target ships and fighters alike, while being able to easily outrun fighters and drones.

You just countered yourself... "same location repeatedly"? Slight problem, many things move, and thus are not going to be in the same location. That is probably why bases/stations get big defense penalties, making them easier to hit.

Such things are pointless in space, partly due to a near vacuum, extreme cold temperatures, and gravity/air friction not being a factor. Ballistics are a whole different thing without gravity, air friction and wind speeds being in the mix.
The one gun only available for troops is probably the only thing that those things would really apply to.

Some sort of mass driver/coil gun would probably be far more practical and effective in space, can't have a stray spark that could easily turn a powder store into a massive bomb, and massive increase of internal pressure vs. no outside pressure = major problems in a space ship, so does a fire that eats up valuable atmosphere.

Other factors.
The ranges in SE space battles is huge. We're not talking hundreds of meters, but hundreds to thousands of kilometers, if not more.
Also, bigger weapons mean more energy, and with a projectile weapon, a much larger projectile is going to need a lot more energy just to keep the same muzzle velocity to maintain the same potential accuracy as a smaller version when in space.

In space, there is nothing 'passive' to counter recoil, such as air, or ground and gravity.

Someone can throw a golf ball and end up changing their course/velocity by a tiny amount.
You get a big gun firing a big shell at very high speeds, and that action will direct its full reaction upon the ship, as there is no 'mass' that the ship can brace up against, meaning it simply has to try and use engines/thrusters to try and counte the recoil.

I'm no engineer, but I have a lot of interest in military stuff as my dad was a WWII vet, and I tend to watch a lot of shows relating to the military, weapons, etc, on History Channel and occasionally Discovery Channel, toss in liking assorted war movies, sci-fi settings, etc...

I would see energy weapons as being much more accurate than projectile weapons, regardless of size, simply because of the nature of the weapon, mainly a sub-luminal or near luminal velocity energy beam/stream or otherwise not having to deal with trying to accelerate solid mass to high speeds.

One advent in technology that would give energy weapons an advantage would be particle beam based weapons that could utilize a solid state EM system to actually 'aim' the beam as it's leaving the 'emmiter', which could allow for a much finer level of control (and perhaps much wider firing arc) than a ballistic weapon that needs to be aimed to fire a projectle on an intercept course. Getting a beam that travels at even 10% light speed (30,000 km/s) will be easier to 'hit' a target than a projectile that might be lucky to be going 100km/s.

One example, the game Homeworld Cataclysm.
Ballistic weapons were not exactly that accurate, but a specialized frigate had a helix shaped ion beam system to fit a lot of accelerator 'length' in a 'short' space, and tied into multiple solid state beam arrays, it could be swatting down small targets a lot faster an easier than the equivilent anti-fighter ballistic weapons many ships had, simply due to the accuracy of the weapon and almost nil travel time between shooting and target 'impact', and the nature of the solid state beam array eliminating the need to 'aim' a physical 'barrel' at targets, the weapons could aim as fast as a targeting system could handle.

An issue that hasn't really been covered sufficiently here is that in SE:V there are several different sources of accuracy penalties, from quite contradictory sources, rolled into a single number.

For instance, there is a fairly harsh penalty for range. Larger, more stable weapons and/or mounts should be able to do a better job of hitting things that are farther away. There are also considerable penalties against ships that are small, and for the even smaller fighters; smaller, more nimble weapons and/or mounts should be able to do a better job of hitting such targets. But currently, both of these mechanics use the same number.

Point-defense weapons hack around this by simply being inherently more accurate, but *only* being able to target small things, to prevent them from becoming "sniper" weapons against capital ships.

What we really need is a way to have weapons and mounts that can cancel certain specific types of penalty, or provide bonuses against specific sorts of targets; but this requires substantial mods at best, or actual code changes. What I'd like to see is something like RangePenalty, SizePenalty, SpeedPenalty, ECMPenalty as separate numbers (ultimately added together to provide TotalPenalty), allowing components to work against them independently. So, a Slow Tracking Mount could perhaps halve RangePenalty and double SizePenalty and SpeedPenalty; an ECCM component could cancel out some or all of ECMPenalty, but never actually provide a bonus; and so on.

I see no contradiction. Accuracy is what it is: you're trying to hit a specific spot, you fire multiple shots at it. How many get how close to where you intended to put them? Whether the target is moving or not certainly matters from a standpoint of knowing where you should aim in order to hit it, but from the standpoint of how accurate you can shoot, does not. There's a difference between being able to aim in the right place to hit the moving target and being able to put the shot where you are aiming.

Air cannot effectively counter a weapon's recoil; I'm not sure what you mean about gravity. At the end of the free body diagram, there needs to be something with inertia (to minimize the resulting acceleration from the "equal and opposite reaction" and keep things steady). Typically this comes from good ol' mass of the ship itself, which is why you could not put a huge gun on a tiny ship and expect it to be stable while shooting. Engines or thrusters are not necessary to provide stability for taking a shot.

I'm not going to agree or disagree with you on that, though I will say that focusing light over long distances is no easy task, and I'd imagine any energy weapon would face similar challenges (dissipation would be a big issue). Keeping to the discussion on whether mounts are necessary or effective, a larger mount would provide more room for a bigger lens and with that the ability to better control a variable focus point on the target for such a weapon.

Unfortunately, mounts cannot alter what a weapon can and cannot target, hence largely why you're stuck with PDS versions of the various guns.

A MIRV seeker would be extremely fun, but I'm not sure it's possible - the best you really get is being able to install five times as many and dropping the reload or damage or whatever by 5 in return, but unfortunately other than Honesty(tm) I'm not sure you can prevent a smaller craft from cheating and just taking one.

Or perhaps not - the rules for limits of items in the vessel can be pretty extensive... hmmmm. (Of course, you can't do much about having an animation of one missile splitting into three, so it'll always be a massed missile salvo. Sorry, folks.)