warship turrets, why not?

[Starfox1701]

Ok since Battletech is essentially ww1 and ww2 in space why don't battletech warships have main and secondary battery turrets like ships from those eras? Why are the essentially designed like 17th century ships of the line?

[cray]

Ok since Battletech is essentially ww1 and ww2 in space

Not really. The maneuvers of ships that can accelerate for days and fighters that accelerate for hours don't favor broadside battles and sustained fighter dogfights. See High Speed Closing Engagements in Strategic Operations for the some of the potential oddities of BT space combat.

why don't battletech warships have main and secondary battery turrets like ships from those eras?

They do have turret-mounted weapons, which is why weapons have firing arcs rather than firing in fixed lines. However, those turrets and their descriptions are left to fluff while the weapons in game play are handled by the simplification of firing arcs. Mounting dozens or hundreds of weapons on explicitly-defined, individually targeted and targetable turrets in the fashion of ground vehicles also gets messy from both conceptual and rules approaches. The multi-turret system eventually developed for support vehicles was burdensome enough.

[Starfox1701]

I'm familiar with them. I thought it was a nice extrapolation of what can be a very complex engagement scenario.

As far as the advanced support vehicle rules they all seam a but cumbersome but I suspect that's because your dealing with vehicles so large that they don't really fit in the scale of the standard game. The turret rules are also a bit more restrictive then I would like considering an average ww2 warship can have close to 20 turrets and a large naval vessel caps out at 9.

Most weapons in game right now are mounted in what I would term casemates or sponsons not true turrets. It also doesn't help that based on the artwork that dispite there mass most weapons appear outlandishly small when compared to the size of the ship. I thinkthat the older artwork for dropships and warships needs updated.

I would say there is a general consensus that spaceship weapons need to be mounted differently because of the abuses that the current fire control rules allow, but there is far less consensus on adding turrets because without a major retcon all current ships don't have them. Done properly turrets would be a naval warfare revolution akin to what Dreadnought was in 1906.

Designing rules for turrets on warships is easy. Making the system backwards compatible with existing hulls not so much :[

I suspect too that the need for new record sheets would not be very popular without a comprehensive overhaul of the warship rules in general.