quick design questions for my wip fighter Aprunner

It's about the right size for a single turret, but you're really pushing past what I'd call "fighter" territory.

Those turrets are too small to be anything other than decorative. If you want turrets, I'd suggest instead adding weapon "arms" to the ship. Something that reads more like wings or pilons that you can cram with weapon systems, then devote your main body to power and thrust. If you make the weapon arms sleek enough, then it can still read as fast, while actually being a good weapon system for striking larger warships and other fighters.

The shape of this ship is also ideal for making an orbital or scorpion style turret like you saw on a lot of Nastral's old ships. Then you could make a ship that could fire in 360 degrees while still looking good and natural in a resting position.


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This is a scorpion turret BTW. As you can see it just looks like part of the ship, until it starts to swivel all around maneuvering around the profile of the main ship. Orbialt turrets are similar except they mount on the top or bottom of the ship and swivel around it

Nice design, JinM
I definitely agree with both Nebulon-B_Frigate_FTW and Nosajimiki.

Some people totally make 50k mass ships that look like fighters, yeah. That happens. Some people IRL say all kinds of random nonsense like "spend more to save more," so I take what people do with a grain of salt. Much of what people build is more about appearance than anything else and the voxel size means you need to go very big for any appreciable detail.

My tendency is to regard fighters as drones: very ant or wasp-like. I treat each fighter as a "self-propelled capital turret" in itself (and capital turrets as anchored fighters). Putting turrets on them always feels redundant because they are already so maneuverable. Add to that practical issues like entity count and past problems with shipyards handling docked entities... my fighter doctrine has definitely evolved in the direction of them being turrets rather than having turrets.

Anyway - your fighter looks cool. A scorpion turret or other, decorative faux turret seems ideal to my eye.

Something to note here is that the Y-Wing in Star Wars canonically has a turret, but the Rebels never bothered with it because TIEs are so easy to destroy anyways and it'd need a dedicated gunner to be of any use (and at that point, why not just get something like the Millennium Falcon that can survive more than two turbolaser shots and be dedicated to destroying fighters instead of harassing capitals?)

The y wing is kinda a bad example there because the rebels had access to models both with and without the turrets/gunners seat. Isnt that also the mount for its ion cannons, which were used to disable and capture ships? I cant remember that part...

In game terms though, if i build a fighter/bomber with a turret, its typically a point defense/ams turret, to help protect against missiles, primarily from other fighter craft. My bombers i put light laser turrets on to give them a bit more edge against small interceptors, but those still arent very useful. A space superiority fighter can get a kick out of having its own ams turret, but theres not a good reason to put its main guns on turrets or anything. Your ship looks big enough to justify a small anti missile turret for defense, but id probably make that belly turret a hard mount that just looks like it should be able to swivel.

The actual hull looks awesome, by the way.