Screenshots

Howedar, modeller extrodinaire for the Sacrifice of Angels mod, came up with this idea to work around the problem of ships with turrets and MAD animations. For example, most Babylon 5 mods have an Omega-class destroyer which has a section that rotates continuously to provide gravity for its crew. Homeworld will not update turrets on a ship with an animation that plays continuously, so most Omegas have turrets that do not move.

This setup side-steps that problem by using EBGs as the turrets instead of pieces of the actual ship mesh. Each turret has two weapons in it. One is a projectile weapon. It's fireEvent and bulletEffect have been modified to look like it's firing two bullets at once. This is purely cosmetic; I only did that to match up with the other gun. The other gun is a beam weapon. It has no fireEvent or hitEvent, and its bulletEffect has been changed so it creates a small turret at the near side of the beam. (The mesh is the centauri Drone, stolen from Dark Age 1) Beam weapons constantly update their bullets to keep them pointing at their targets, so the 'turret' appears to track properly.

This is not a perfect solution. The turrets only appear when the ship enters combat, and they disappear when the ship stops firing. Although this is not ideal for the Omega, it works quite well for ships like Babylon 5, which constantly rotates and has a pop-up defense grid.