Sorry, I just mean like Heavy Gun (eg. HBC-8 Armageddon, M-204 Avenger, M-801 Polaris). I haven't played SW2, so I don't know about it's weapon types. In other words "Biggun".

For weapon proficiency perks (eg. Machine Gun Proficiency, Heavy Gun Proficiency), is the weapon type decided on the damage dealt.
Meaning turrets will also be boosted by the perks?

I'm just not quite at the stage where I can easily test these things out, sorry if its a pain. Trying to get some modding done when I can't be bothered playing, and I play when I cant be bothered modding.

Edit: The Charon cache gave me 1 Berserk Laser, I took a detour to the out systems before to pick up 12 Mk2 Berserk Lasers. >_>
Edit2: Weird, preliminary balance testing (mucking around) shows that having a Phoenix (10 hp/sec repair) on a Dragon T (300sp/10r shields, 2000hp) is better than a Granite (+350sp/3r). That or Greyhair is lucky. Having an Overbank DID NOT go well for Ternie... Actually, upon reading it... It doesn't seem so weird, it makes sense.

Okay, heres how things work.

Heavygun and Missile are interchangable, as they both operate the same, with either a very large gun or a missile pod sticking out of the hull of the ship. Smallgun is NOT interchangable with anything, as smallguns do not have an external model, the point on the hull is just where the muzzleflash comes out. Turret is also not interchangable with anything, as its a turret as opposed to a large gun or a missile pod sticking out of the hull. You can still technically change biggun type to turret type, but it would not look good at all without modifying the X, Y, and Z values. Actually, you can add as many heavyguns, smallguns, missiles, and turrets as you want, but you would have to define the X, Y, Z, and orientation values by hand, which is not difficult, just timeconsuming.

Also, It is difficult to put lots of turrets on a fighter, simply because of how large turrets are (Especially the Yataghan, for some reason the double-cannon turrets are larger than the average turret).

Yes

Hmm.. I never use any shield boosters (armor rep very rarely). IMO better to get more speed and maneuverability. Enemy pilots will have less chance to hit you and your pilot will attack more often. Of course, it depends on your tactics.

Actually it's easy as... whatever;). In the IMDEditor you have section named "Parameters": p1,p2,p3. These are X,Y,Z refpoint's dimensions multipliers (make all weapons models fully scaleable). Check these screenshots. Big Guns are @3 times greater than turrets.
btw adding multiple weapon refpoints is much less time consuming when you use 3DSMax.

Hmm, does not cause any issues with obnoxiously large muzzle flashes or anything like that?

Registration on the StarRover forum seems broken, tried both English and Russian settings. Oh well.

Anyway, that Aleksty guy posted something interesting about radar.
That was him quoting someone named Nafigator. He added,
Hmm. Let's see what we have.

1. Radars (see Modules.xml) have 2 values, resolution and max_distance. The latter is easy to understand, it just means how far the radar scans.
2. Ships have an EPR value (see Carcasses.xml).
3. Stealth modules (see Modules.xml) have a cloaking_ratio value.

Ok here's my guess. Resolution is how "fine grained" the radar is - a calculation is applied using the radar's resolution and compared to the ship's EPR value, which determines whether it can be detected or not.

Cloaking ratios are less than 1 (in-game text says "%") so I'm guessing they are a multiplier for the EPR value. Example: EPR = 10 and cloaking ratio = .6, the result will be 10 x .6 = 6. So cloaking ratios make EPR values smaller.

This means the radar resolution should not detect EPR values if they are lower than some value. Of course, it cannot be a flat calculation - surely if the ship is in front of your face, it doesn't matter whether your radar can detect it or not, right? However, game does not have a "visual range". So this must somehow tie back into the radar.

I think the radar calculation must also include distance. This is the only way a ship has any chance of detecting anything. Otherwise if you stack multiple cloaking devices and attack something it will not fight back because it cannot see you (e.g. long range missile sniping tactic). This is fine for missiles (ship is truly out of range) but for radar it doesn't make sense to be undetectable if you are right in front of his face.

All ships have an innate base radar (see Carcasses.xml) built in - we know radar modules extend the range, but I'm not sure if the resolution is also replaced. E.g. ship has short-range radar with good resolution, but player adds radar module with long-range radar with bad resolution. Ha, what happens?

-
I'm going to try stacking 4 stealth modules on a fighter and see if targets respond to me. The Ghost module gives 80% cloaking, so 4 of them should give me 0.2 x 0.2 x 0.2 x 0.2 = 0.0016 to apply to base EPR. If distance is not factored into radar calculation then I should be invisible and not be attacked by hostile targets no matter how close I get.

I'll remove the fighter's guns so he doesn't start firing as soon as he is in range, and switch missiles to off. That way I won't "hit first".

Update:
Well, 4x Ghosts renders me close to undetectable. Crap. You can see in the screenshot, I'm practically escorting those pirates (Hero's ship has higher speed).

Hmm, game crashed - LOGfile.txt is complaining can't load textures. Could be mod trouble, I loaded an earlier save which didn't have Fleet mod installed. Wait, I thought I downloaded the mothership mod-compatible carcasses.xml. Nanaki you wanna take a look and see if it means anything?

Damn, can't do more testing now, gotta take young cousins out to amusement park lol.

Update:
Huh, guess what - the targets still don't react even if you start breaking out with the missiles and ramming it up their rear ends at point blank. They just keep on flying even though they're getting blasted to bits by my stealthed ship - which was flying so close to them it was practically escorting them.

I'm gonna see if they react if my stealthed ship has guns and starts shooting them up.

Update:
Wow, totally unexpected. They don't even freaking react to guns. My fighter just sat there behind them blowing them out of the sky one by one at leisure.

One strange thing though, surely some enterprising player has attempted full stealth before. I mean, all you have to do is park the mothership somewhere safe, like several clicks above the system plane, and then send one full stealth fighter out to kill everyone. It's not like it's particularly complicated.

Haha, I did this in a Cheetah, I was calling it the Super Rambo. Taking everyone out and not being spotted. Normal Rambo is what I do with my Hero when there too many ships to win in a dog fight, I send him out solo with a big radar, stealth and some rockets. I haven't tried 4 Blackholes giving the entire team high stealth though. You'd essentially have twice the likelihood of being discovered though (compared to x4 ghost).

Also to Trucidation you said something in another topic about adding the alien fighter. I could throw that together if no one else has yet.

As far as modding is going, the turrets work wonders, thanks guys. The big dual dual kinetic cannons look and sound so cool firing from Dragons, shame about the dispersion. And the makeshift texture isn't to bad.

But with the tractor beam... All the mother ships that have some seem to have this "lit.orig_03 - Default" material, which is blue like the beam (seeing as the texture is greyscale). Speaking of texture, the tractor beam texture isn't the texture for the material either. I've tried to mirror the beams used on other ships, but the materials bit is the only one I cant replicate. I was looking for the thread where someone says they were enjoying their tractor beam equipped interceptor (something like that) but I couldn't find it with a tractor beam search. What's the trick to adding tractor beams on interceptors?

Additional info about EPR (suggested by Aleksty).
AI.ini (auto translated)

Hmm, radar is affected by speed? I thought distance would play a role.

@StarShatter:
Thanks, that would be nice. The alien ships have many system slots but by default most of them are empty! Such a shame.

What's wrong with the kinetic cannons' dispersion? It's just one value in the Modules.xml file, if I'm not mistaken. Just tweak that and they'll be as pinpoint sharp as lasers (but be careful, at the rate those things pump out bullets, they'll be killer weapons if they're too accurate) ;)

I need to learn how to add ships myself but for now I'm busy with other scripts. I'm also translating into english the german modding handbook for Star Wolves 2 - it's not going to be very good because I don't know any willing German translators and have to rely on machine translations... Still, it should finished in 2 days (Tuesday) hopefully.

Edit:
By the way, if someone out there really wants some ships to edit, try looking up some mods for the space sim Freelancer. There's a mod for it called the Rebalance mod - it should have dozens of ship grafted to it, god knows I spent years playing that game lol. (That game has some really great ideas, the only problem is, like most space sims, the player is basically limited to 1 ship. Star Wolves really is the only game series of this type which has a "mothership" + team concept. In my limited knowledge... there may be other games like these, but I haven't discovered them.)

If you use my mod, you can easily change ship you want to buy.

Example: gw.script file. Only two changes are needed.

1. This function is activated when you choose to buy a Gunslinger T in the maintenance station menu. If you want to buy alien fighter change the "Gunslinger_mk2_black0" to "A_Fighter_0"
Below you will find the table:

2. Do the same as before, change the "Gunslinger_mk2_black0" to "A_Fighter_0".

If you want your fighter as additional menu entry you have to add new dialog answer in the DialogGW.xml, make additional function like in 1. and add new line in the fighters table 2.