Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2008 3:14 pm
To answer it once and for all:j f gearing wrote:I think I've made a twit of myself (what's new)
I was expecting the P and S lasers to be forward firing
I'm sure i've been attacked by ICs like this
Apologies all round
JG
In Oolite NPCs and player-ship lasers are two different matters, only slightly related to each other. NPCs can have multiple front lasers, which player ships can't. So what you have seen attacking you is an IC with his three front lasers (one mounted in his nose, the other two in the nacelles; so if you shoot off the nacelles, these two will be gone).
This has nothing to do with port and starboard lasers. In Oolite NPCs cannot have port and starboard weapons, only front and rear. So you will never be attacked in the way Hoopy describes as one possibility to take on a Thargoid Carrier.
Player ships, however, can have laser mounts in all directions (which does not imply that all ships actually have these laser mounts; there are a lot of ships that can fit only front laser, or only front and rear). These work in exactly the same way for all player ships, so no difference here between an IC and a CobraIII: The laser points straight away from the ship. So your front laser fires to the front, your rear laser fires to your back, and your port and starbord lasers fire to, well... errm... your port and starboard side, respectively. You activate them when, and only when you chose the respective view. There is no way of firing backward while looking through your front screen, or firing forward while looking through your port screen. (Although external views are more flexible in this respect: Whatever external view you are looking at, pulling the trigger will fire the laser in the direction you had activated last. (There may be an underlying bug in the code at this point. At least I don't know what the "weapon_facing" = FORWARD; in all external view-definitions actually does. It seems superfluous to me.))
