This is re. the whole guns turrets business, not sure where it'll turn up in this huge thread though.
It all goes back to good old EV, me flying around in a lovely little Kestrel (EVO at this point just a handful of systems and an A4's worth of ideas), with maxed-out photon cannons and turrets. With a reasonably manoeuvrable ship you could always apply more firepower than the AI could hope to return (and I've always felt sorry for the AI, battered by Monty Pythoners and even more ruthlessly brutal humans), and dodging all secondary weapons is fairly easy. So with one Kestrel suitably outfitted you could take out about 3, 4, 5 AI Kestrels before having to retreat and recharge for a while (anyone else remember the biggest mission-battle in EV with the Pirate fleet of ~10 Kestrels?).
Anyway, part of putting a stop to this was limiting turret slots - so the Igazra and UE Cruiser have 5 turrets each, and have five turret slots each. The main problem was that players could always use the gun slots in addition to the turret slots, whereas the AI can only ever fire one primary weapon (IIRC). The obvious thing therefore was to stop players from cramming both guns and turrets in. So just my petty play-balancing at work I'm afraid. Not a question of realism but gameplay - but then there's not very much that's realistic to be found in EVO in general so at least I'm consistent :).
In general, I'm not quite sure how this new EVO upgrade will affect gameplay. Once the app. is complete, I'll have a short while to update the data files so as to implement all the new features. But I won't be able to play and replay the missions the same ridiculous number of times I originally did - what I mean is, some missions/situations could become easier or harder, some ships far more or less formidable, purely without intention on my part. All this stems from the problem of communication and co-ordination between me and Matt. I have a few ideas, like lowering the shield values for fighters if they're simply too lethal, but the new version could be a very dangerous and frightening beast for the unwary, and even those who consider themselves experienced.
Peter Cartwright.