The weapons, this update will include the bulk of the cannon type weapons of the conventional line.

30mm revolver cannon (uses same ammo as the CIWS and 30mm rotary) this gun will come in SG fixed 1x4 blocks, SG chin mount turret, size TBD, and SG/LG small CIWS turret, 1x1 large and 5x5 small grid. the cannon will have a ROF of 600 RPM.

100mm Turret, a quick firing high elevation cannon that can fire either HE or Flak fused shells (changed with ammo selection but uses the same mag item) this will be the primary flak turret for NW and will have a ROF of probably around 60. 3x3 LG (I am considering a SM version as well)

200mm Turret, this larger twin gun turret. This will fire the same style of dual fuse HE shells as the 100mm and can be used as a large flak gun as well as a main gun turret. This is also a 3x3 but has a large 2 block high ammo loading area as part of the turret, meaning you will need a good bit of space open under the turret.

300mm triple gun turret. Large main gun turret that can fire either HE or AP rounds, 5x5 with a large loading area under the turret.

400mm Twin gun turret, same as above, also a 5x5.

There are a few other weapons that might or might not make the next update. After this I will be working on either missile weapons or plasma weapons.

The big thing with this update will be a change in the overall balance of the mod. The choice between HE or AP weapons will become a big one. AP weapons will have much more narrow paths of damage but work better vs heavy armor. HE will do more damage overall but be a bit less effective vs heavy armor and have the disadvantage of being able to be shot down by point defense weapons. in most cases HE will be able to kill a ship faster if it has poor point defense, if the ship has good point defense you might be forced to use AP and it will be in general harder to kill them with it. As part of this change the railguns, because they are AP only, will see a bit of a change in there primary role. They will be the sniper weapons of NW, they will be getting a buff to there accuracy but they will be doing less area damage then they do now. For railguns to be most effective you will want to make sure to use subsystem targeting. The ROF and Velocity will probably be changing for some of the Railguns as well, as many have pointed out the 75mm shoots way to fast right now.

Another change I am considering is splitting the pack into 2-4 mods and using this mod as the all in one pack based on dependencies. This might cause problems for people running servers or it might make it easier on them if they only want to use for example conventional weapons (no railguns, plasma or laser weapons) I am still unsure about this change I would love some feedback on it.

I'm curious to see what you come up with and how the new guns will work.

I think the 75mm railgun has a fairly decent ROF. Not sure it needs to be nerfed. A change I wouldn't mind seeing is an increase to the elevation angle of the larger railgun turrets. Right now, I'm using the guns mainly for station defense and the larger guns don't have the ability to elevate high enough to really provide much coverage. The 75mm has decent coverage, but the range and damage are limited. I'm looking to mount the larger fixed railguns to rotors to try to achieve better coverage with longer range and higher damage. If I were mounting these to a ship, which I might in the future, elevation won't be much of an issue as I could just tilt the ship.

As for splitting the mod up, personally, I prefer the one-stop shopping of a mod that has everything built in. I already have a number of mods on my list, more than I can really keep track of. I'm not keen to add more mods to the list when one mod can do the job. I don't play on a server, so not sure if my feedback counts.

I would be pro-breaking up, if to a limited extent.

I like the current mod's set of weapons -- they're consistent, imo, to the technology level theme of the game as a whole. There aren't high-powered beam/directed-energy weapons, for example. I realize some people might want those, and Northwind is well enough put together that I can see the draw to add them. If they were in a "Northwind Advanced Technology Weapons" mod, then I would not have to. Similarly with even larger scale weapons for capital ships, were they to be added. For me, the largest weapons in the current mod are already big enough; but I can see where others might want more. If they were in a separate mod, then those who did not want them would not need to include them at all.

It comes down to keeping the number of split-mods to a reasonable number, and keeping the theme for each consistent.

I am leaning toward keeping this core NW mod as an all in one and just making individual packs for each branch of weapon. Its more work when updating then doing dependencies but I think it will be easier on the users.

So this mod will have all the NW weapons other then NW Heavy, that will have all the heavy weapons (when I get around to making them) and then there will be 3 other individual packs for people that want to customize what weapons are in there worlds, NW Railguns, NW Plasma and NW Conventional. So you can either use the all in one pack (this mod) or any combination of the 4 individual packs.

I am new to this mod, I was going to start using it today. I wanted to look into using it instead of vanilla gatling and missile turrets. Are your upcoming changes backward-breaking? Will I need to redesign my ship if I use it now?

No, none of the changes will break existing builds. after the update you might want to change a few things as the balance will change a bit and there will be lots more options (big update adding lots of new weapons) but everything will still work.

im also in favor of a breake up as i and my friends switched to this mod for main weapons to much new weapons would brake any kind of balancing we but together and it apears there will be a huge dependency on point defence or else HE is going to be the way to go
maybe want to keep HE efficiency against heavy armor low
shredding light armor and internals will allready be good enough without it becoming a good at everything kind of weapon/ammo

Making different mod-packs seems to be a good idea. The balancing between the weapons is good at the moment. As a suggestion: i would like to see missiles next, because the vanilla ones are a bit week compared to the weapons in this mod. In my personal point of view, the 30mm Turrets have a slow turnrate for a Flak-Turret.

Im am realy looking forward to the new HE and AP ammo. AP to kill armor, and HE to clean the inside of the ships sounds good to me :)

yep, Missiles are next.

Would the flak rounds be capable of detonating in proximity to a target or would they be just a HV, anti-fighter cannon?

I've not loaded up the game with these mods in a while, so forgive me if this has been addressed but the last time I loaded the mod the GAU-8's rounds were HUGE as far a storage size went. I think I could fit around 40 rounds in a Medium Cargo Container on a small grid while I could comparatively fit maybe 100 of the larger small grid railgun rounds... was this intentional?

I also think the WP version of the vanilla gats were much faster at deforming large blocks with concentrated fire than the GAU-8. Considering the heat build up limits the GAU-8's ability to deal sustained fire are you going to take another look at it's damage?

The Flak rounds will be proximity detonation with shrapnel, like the real thing. All the mag sizes are set to how big the actual ammo item is, or as close as I can estimate. those ammo boxes are rather big and it limiting the ammo you can carries is intended. as for damage, the 30mm round do slightly more damage then the vanilla replacement 25mm, I think 10 more to be exact, at least for the AP part of the belt, the HE part does less but over a 1m area and the tracer does almost nothing. overall a single 30mm rotary cannon should be doing about the same damage as 6 or so vanilla gats.

That's great about the Flak rounds! If you're planing on missiles at some point maybe some swarm missiles or that work the same would be a cool addition for taking out faster moving targets! Maybe even an interceptor missile for taking out incoming torpedoes?

I'll take another look into the GAU and it's ammo economy. Didn't realize those were ammo boxes, thought it was a single round each.

Thanks for the reply! I'm looking forward to the next round of updates!