Turret AI [TC]

[Kowalskibravo]

Hey all, i've been playing vanilla x3 TC for a while now and have noticed one common factor: the APPALLING accuracy of the turrets on all ships. Is there any mod that fixes this without changing any vanilla gameplay?

[StarSword]

You generally want to ask about mods on the Scripts and Mods forum; otherwise the moderators get antsy.

That said, what are you aiming at, and what gun are you aiming with? The tracking speed of the turrets is dependent on the size of the gun. (Fighter guns and flak guns track very fast, corvette guns track fast, IBLs track slower, and destroyer guns track extremely slow.)

With line-of-sight weapons like X lasers, the best the auto-aim on your ship can do is guess where the target will be if it maintains the same heading and speed. Since especially against fighters you can't be sure of that, you're going to miss a lot. The only good countermeasure against fighters for a capital ship is dedicated flak guns, chiefly flak artillery arrays and starburst shockwave cannons.

Also, consider this: TV notwithstanding, the vast majority of shots fired in gun battles on Earth are misses. Just something to think about.

[Triaxx2]

Nothing beats MARS, though as mentioned, you'll want to look it up in S&M.

However, in vanilla it comes down to a couple of things. First, what turret AI commands are you using? Missile Defense slows down the rate of fire for no readily apparent reason. Protect ship might be trying to switch fire to whatever is hitting your ship, causing it to fire at one while trying to track to another. Attack Fighters/Attack Capitals will cause the same problem.

The other thing is the aforementioned weapon problems. IRE's have a very high rate of fire, but sheer volume of shots will generate a lot of misses. PAC has a lower rate of fire, and a larger projectile and a lot of range. However it's range also generates a seeming stream of rounds missing. HEPT has a huge round, but it's also slower so it will appear to miss a lot.

Tracking is also a big issue. Turrets turn at the speed of the slowest weapon mounted on turret.

[DiArmada]

when auto-aim is off, it's quite hard to hit targets.
personally I like the "semi" setting.
I'm not sure if this answers your question.

[Nanook]

AI-controlled turrets don't care about auto-aim. That's only used by the player when manually firing weapons.

[StarSword]

AI-controlled turrets don't care about auto-aim. That's only used by the player when manually firing weapons.

Yeah, but the turrets still make an effort to lead their targets automatically. That's close enough to "auto-aim" for government work.

[Alan Phipps]

... but unlike the Player, they don't have workable aiming options or an override to do 'what-if' pot-shots or 'wall of fire' bullet streams. Think of turrets as being 'permanently stuck' in slavishly following current predicted auto-aim even when a crossing target is obviously turning and evading the fire.

[Nanook]

AI-controlled turrets don't care about auto-aim. That's only used by the player when manually firing weapons.

Yeah, but the turrets still make an effort to lead their targets automatically. That's close enough to "auto-aim" for government work.

The point I was making was that the auto-aim controls mentioned by DiArmada do not apply to turrets. You can't turn it on or off and you can't adjust it using the 'k' key.

[Kowalskibravo]

First off, Thanks for all the responses! Secondly, ill put up a scenario so that you see where im coming from and know whats going on over here in my game. I had a centaur with all HEPT up front and PRG in the turrets. But the turrets hardly ever hit their targets! and thats with the fast tracking speed of the light gun and very high accuracy of the projectile

[Alan Phipps]

".. and very high accuracy of the projectile." But that is the problem, the PRG doesn't have that. The single PRG burst spreads out a lot with range which makes it effective against large targets and makes a series of occasional low-damage hits likely against smaller targets, but the majority of shots will miss against low profile and small targets at longer range. Throw in a small agile target whose trajectory is crossing and turning at any sort of range and you have a low significant damage probability from a single PRG.

PAC in the turrets would probably be better in those last circumstances, although not by too much, while HEPT would hardly ever hit at all. EBC at most combat ranges and MD at a close enough range would also work though.