At some point I began paying more attention to the game engine. I noticed things like the pathetic speeds that the ships attain and the general feeling of smallness (do Deimos-class corvettes seem like they're 900 meters/yards long to you?).

Another thing that bothered me was that, what with the beam and flak weapons, the normal laser turrets that were the main FreeSpace 1 capital ship weapon are less than useless in FS2. So I decided to have my first MOD be one that would address the problem.

Looking at various sci-fi universes, I concluded that the Star Wars turbolasers come the closest to what the FS2 laser turrets should be. So I set off to remake the FS2 turrets in the Star Wars image; rapid-fire, high-speed laser bolts.

Now, I could have simply done just that - increased the velocity and fire rate settings - and been done with it. But of course that would have been boring. So I diversified a bit, and made the 3 turrets for each side serve various purposes. Some are great at knocking the heck out of bombers on their bombing runs, some do significant subsystem damage, etc.

In general I did increase the velocity and fire rate, but I tried to keep the danger of the player being totally destroyed by the new turrets fairly low (unless you like flying in straight lines...). They're more of a serious hinderance. So with many of the turrets their shield damage is still quite low. Oh, yeah - I also changed the Fusion Mortar a bit since it was pretty useless (Fusion Mortars are those slow rocket-bombs that the Fenris- and Leviathan-class cruisers shoot from their bottom turret).

Check out all the changes in the readme.