question about capship turrets

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d3r3k

Spaceman
are capship turrets manned or electronically controlled from the bridge? i would imagine that shipkiller turrets are controlled from the bridge.
 
I think they're controlled from the bridge but I can't give you the official answer. They don't seem to be shielded (at least when I played they didn't seemed to be) so I can't imagine why anyone would want to be in them during combat.
 
Gunnery control itself is located in/near the bridge/CIC on larger ships... but there are also certainly people in the gun turrets to load and maintain them (remember a point in End Run where a larger turret is blown off the Tarawa, with a number of people trapped inside).
 
There's a turret crew to man each turret (dual laser turrets and Anti-Matter Guns). There are smaller point defense laser cannons and gatling mass drivers, but those are automated and connected directly to the computer network.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
(remember a point in End Run where a larger turret is blown off the Tarawa, with a number of people trapped inside).
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I thought that was the "armored bow" rather than a gun turret. The way I had it pictured in my head was a good chunk of the ship, like the forward third, sheering off.
 
Those were the jury rigged mass driver turrets that they attatched to the bow of the ship though, that needed to be manually controlled, not the turrets built onto the Tarawa originally, weren't they?
 
Spien said:
Those were the jury rigged mass driver turrets that they attatched to the bow of the ship though, that needed to be manually controlled, not the turrets built onto the Tarawa originally, weren't they?
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That was a turret taken off a space station, IIRC. We know that other turrets in WC tended to be human controlled, as the AI-controlled ones weren't considered as good, at least for bombers and fighters. We also know that some space station turrets are manned, but that point-defense turrets are computer-controlled, at least on Kilrathi vessels like the Karga. Given those conditions, I wouldn't say it's much of a stretch to suggest that at least some turrets are manned.
 
While turrets work better when controlled by a human, it is not really necessary for the gunner to be inside the turret itself in all cases. If the gunner can have sufficient camera coverage around the turret, then it is possible to control it from a console safely inside the ship instead of being where only a couple of panes of glass are all that sits between the gunner and getting shot.
 
The turrets on the bow of the Tarawa were manned because they were stripped from a kilrathi orbital base and welded onto the bow of the ship. They had to be manned because they weren't tied into the ships targeting computer (so it appears).
 
Dundradal said:
The turrets on the bow of the Tarawa were manned because they were stripped from a kilrathi orbital base and welded onto the bow of the ship. They had to be manned because they weren't tied into the ships targeting computer (so it appears).
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And from what we've seen, only point defense turrets are normally computer-controlled. What made things special with Denniken's modifications in False Colors was that he tied all the point defense AND the main turrets to computer control, so they could all be used to hose down the drydock and the Vorghath.

In Fleet Action, we see Bear ordering 'all weapons fire independently and at will' in the Battle of Hellhole, then he later orders all weapons to concentrate on a frigate, so the turrets can concentrate fire on a frigate as they pass. If this was all computer controlled, I doubt he'd need to make orders like this: instead, like in False Colors, he could just order the weapons officer to concentrate their turret-fire on a specific target.

Furthermore, in that same novel, they go out of their way to state that Denniken's special project was to modify the 'largely automated point defense lasers' - they specificaly state that the point-defense systems are automated, or mostly automated. In other words, most weapons on ship are human-controlled... and as illustrated in the WC4 Novel, computer-controlled turrets aren't much good at killing things save missiles or other relatively predictable targets. Whether the humans are inside, such as the juryrigged front turret Tarawa had, or else just inside the ship controlling the guns (which may be the case, since in Fleet Action they do mention how some damage from the Battle of Hellhole included some of their mass-driver gun mounts being destroyed) is immaterial - they're human-controlled, to a large degree, on at least several different ships we've seen. We also know that Venture-class corvettes like the Johnny Green also used humans to man the turrets. Three or four different classes of ships here have been shown to have human-controlled gun systems, so I'd say it's fairly safe to hypothesize that both Humans and Kilrathi tend to prefer organic intelligences controlling offensive weaponry, for both reasons of flexibility (a human or Kilrathi can do more than just man a gun) and the skill a gunner can bring.
 
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