Never done it, but I think you just edit this in the weapon_equip.ini

turn_rate = 90

to something really small like:

turn_rate = 5


these are in degrees btw.

Yes, you can do what you want. In the gun's ini, set these two things:

force_gun_ori = true (it's false by default)
turn_rate = 0 (it's 90 by default)

You must change *both* things to make guns fixed-forward.

But, I should note that FL's AI wasn't designed to deal with guns that cannot pivot.

To get the AI to shoot well for my mod (Warriors of the Sky), I made seperate, AI versions of every gun, which can pivot. I then locked down the degrees of freedom for each gun in HardCMP, so that the AI would be able to pivot the guns, but not very far. This combination makes it *look* like the AI cannot really turn its weapons, and is firing forwards, but actually allows it to turn the guns a little bit.

If you're going to do this with "vanilla" Freelancer... you will more-or-less have to build duplicates of every single Weapon and also have to redo the Loadouts for every single ship. It's not that big of a pain to figure out how to do this with Find-and-Replace operations, but it is something that'd need to be done, or the AI wouldn't give you a very good game.

I don't suppose there are any mods for Freelancer that make the joystick playable? I am talking stalk Freelancer, not any added stuff. And I am hoping for a joystick mod that doesn't nerf the AI.

If you do a search, you will see that there are several mods out there that theoretically make it possible to use a joystick. And somebody came up with a key-binding method that allows ships to roll.

But that won't take care of the problem of aiming, I'm afraid- trying to aim FL's cursor with a joystick would be a real pain in the arse.

As for my method "nerfing" the AI... nothing could be farther than the truth, if the modder does their job right. Most players think the AI in WOS is quite difficult to fight against

heh, I have to agree with them Argh, the annoyance of dock-raping AI is overwhelming sometimes

When I said nerf the AI, I meant that they modded the guns and forgot to fix the AI which makes them patheticaly easy to fight.

LOL... well, I wouldn't have described it quite that graphically, but yes, my AI is pretty vicious if it catches you when you exit a Base, in Beta 1. That's fixed in Beta 2, among other issues