Not quite as simple as it sounds unfortunately. What I'm looking to create is a secondary weapon that once fired, will continuously fire until another (specific) secondary weapon is fired, i.e - as an order to fire, rather than specifically firing the weapon. So you would "fire" the Activate Defences weapon, then later "fire" the Deactivate Defences weapon.

The idea being that the player can specify a secondary weapon to continuously fire, allowing them to switch to other secondary weapons, or just concentrate on flying and firing primary weapons.

Specifically I'm trying to create a ship that will produce a sort of vortex effect around itself, continuously damaging an area around it, while it fires ordinary primary and secondary weapons at the same time.

Is such a thing possible? A point defence weapon isn't quite as well suited as it doesn't properly calculate the range, and if I change the effect then it fires in bursts as suitable targets come into range, which isn't desperately helpful as it means any time there isn't an incoming missile or nearby fighter then the effect ceases.

Does anyone know if Nova takes blast radius into account when calculating PD range?

Note also that PD weapons only fire at ships and missiles which have the "vulnerable to PD" flag checked.

If you want it to fire automatically/continuously, it needs to be a PD turret. You can activate and deactivate the turret using the mission menu and OnAbort triggers.

I believe Archon did something similar with a PD-based weapon that would form a protective ring around a ship.

Another option is simply to have the weapon be a "fire once, doesn't stop until it runs out of ammo". The secondary weapon would be an activate and reload function.
The weapon will submunition into itself on destruction. Make it a freefall bomb with lots of damage, a big blast radius, and make prox radius = blast radius. Make sure to check "Doesn't hurt firing ship". When an enemy approaches, it should go off and submunition into another of itself. Make subTheta whatever you want the number of times it can fire before it needs to be "reloaded". Give it a long reload time so that the player can't fire too many of these at once.
If you want it to look like a vortex, just change the explosion graphic.

Note: This will make the weapon create the "vortex" where it is fired, it won't move with the firing ship. This is useful for setting traps, or generally making an area of advantage for the player to fight in. You can even give it impact to push enemy ships away.

This post has been edited by LNSU : 08 April 2010 - 11:48 AM

Interesting ideas! But not quite what I need, however I think I've found an alternative. I'm using point defence as you say, but fitting all ships with an invisible "trigger" attack which fires automatically with a large range, no damage and causes the point defences to activate even if the enemy ship isn't firing yet. In some edge cases it will still become sporadic which is a bit annoying, but in most cases it fires almost non-stop.