If large ships are meant to be unable to out-maneuver fighters, then why are the main guns often not long range enough to engage a fighter before falling to a disadvantage?
TL;DRLarge ship guns are intended to reach further, and many reportedly already do, while Weapons 2.0 in 3.2 resets every weapon's damage, spread and power/heat handling from scratch.
So the short answer is they should be. I think a lot of them actually are already. Maybe they're not far enough, but certainly the intention is they shoot further so they can hit further. With Weapons 2.0, which is coming online with 3.2, we've essentially re-set up every single weapon in the game from scratch. We kept the art assets, but all the actual data record side of it is different. So all the DPS values almost certainly changed. The spread absolutely has changed on all the guns because it's a completely different system. It's gone from this just arbitrary number to an actual degree cone, which is a lot friendlier for designers to understand rather than just this magic number. For ship weapons, they've got all power and heat. That's all changed. So the weapons are all going to be completely different in 3.2 in terms of how they handle and how they do damage.
And I imagine that's part of the conversion from XML to DataForge.
Yes.