What do you mean tap them one by one? The guns on the player ships do fire together, only variable being refire rate

you can group your guns using the 'activate weapons group #' key slots or you can toggle them individually by number - i prefer weapons groups, mapped to the top row of numbers. also, nice thing about weap groups is they save for every character, so you never have to remap them unless you mess them up

procedure for weapons grouping:
assign a key to 'activate weapon group 1' and 2, 3, etc
now, press your 1st group button and deactivate weapons you don't want in the group by clicking them in the cockpit-weapon-window(lower right window)

you can have 8 weapon groups - this is more than enough, heres an example of how to set it up:
low refire guns with high damage group 1 (kill shot)
high refire guns for dogfighting group 2 (harassment)
missiles - maybe energy and explosive, maybe including disruptors and torps group 3

if you've got a capital ship this can be extremely useful for conserving power as well as a psychological edge - you can limit your fire and lull the unsuspecting and naive pilot into complacency

remember that if you use weapon groups you will ALWAYS have one of them selected, which means deactivating a weapon will deactivate it in the active group

also, the 'assign group' keys don't do squat, ignore them

edit: oh i see - then the answer is no, not without a macro program to hit the keys for you

Edited by - Cold_Void on 8/20/2006 7:31:38 AM

I've been trying to get that working for a mod, on the mod there are more powerful shield and hull busters, I wanted to seperate them into a staggered shot, as in hit shields and a split second later fire the hull busters to get maximum damage with most efficient power.

Shooting everything onto the shields isn't 100% efficient use of the weapons...

I could never get it to work properly lol, I will try that later

But, for those of you using his formulae above to assign your weapon groupings, you need to be aware that the projectile speeds have to be more or less the same otherwise you will be constantly changing your aim for each weapon group, choose weapons with similiar speeds if you can so the adjustment is minor.

I've never seen anything that staggers your refire for you, but if you're making a mod and want to do this, just change the refires to things like 2, 3.66, 4.2, 5.33, etc. I know its silly to even suggest, but I know of no other way.

You could make the powerplants ony able to support 1 shot of a class 10 gun. THen your powerplant would fire 1 weapon and be out so then use weapon groups. Nomads would be a issue for you though unless you made them use energy. If you used lower than maximum class guns for the ship it would not take all the energy up in one slot. So you would want to limit each ship to 1 or 2 classes of guns ie just class 9 and 10 for vhf excluding hammerhead. You would also want to make Nomads use energy. Your powerplant regeneration would have to be equal to your powerplant as after 1 shot it owuld be down.

Or you could do it just manually, if you reconfigure your keyboard bindings to fit the anatomy of your keyboard hand and are willing to put in a couple of hours of quality practice time.

It's a very effective technique. One shot kills whats left of the shield, the following shot already does damage to the hull. This way you can have the enemy's hull down to 66% while he just worked down your shields. And that is heads on without evasive maneuvers from both players. Another advantage is the increased possibility to hit your enemy's missiles with your gunfire.

I've become so used to it I find it hard to not use it on simpler tasks like mining

Edited by - Preacher0815 on 9/5/2006 2:00:54 PM