I basically am imagining a recreation of the dive bombing scenes in Midway in Vendetta, with Raptor UDVs "dive bombing" capital ships using Avalon Torpedoes (yes, irony).

To that effect, what if Avalon Torpedoes were given a very slow turn rate while retaining the speed they were launched at if they are launched closer than a certain range (1km - 1.5 km?) to a targeted cap ship?

If possible, I'd like to exclude anything smaller than a Goliath.

This idea ought to be balanced against the cap rail, cap gauss, and cap swarms via parameters of turn rate and tracking launch range, while taking into consideration the characteristics of various L-port ships.

+2 Back in 2018, there was a top 10 suggestion thread, and I listed this there. Still want it. There are very few stationary ships in the galaxy (HACs in deneb i guess are one). Slow moving ships are still going to be missed targets when it comes to unguided weapons. Give em a little tracking.

Why limit it to cap ships? That sounds like it just adds complexity from a development standpoint. They would hypothetically turn so little that anything other then an afk miner would be safe from them anyway. Afk miners are already quite vulnerable to basically everything anyway, so why worry about it?

I guess the major point in this would amount to how much of a tracking turn would it make. There are already other weapons that will track a targeted Trident. I know they don't do the damage that Avalons do, but it they get to tracking too much, how many Tridents will actually be out flying when others are flying and looking to kill them. I believe that most want to have more Cap Ship actions and battles, so would this add to it or reduce it. Also, how much tracking and turning would you expect the Avalons to make when launched within 1km?

It's really hard to say without seeing it in action; I could pull out a number but it would be more or less meaningless without testing and balance. Very hypothetically: a turn rate of one degree per second? It should be slow enough not to make evasive action futile but fast enough to make launching within the radius worthwhile.

Alternately: rather than a fixed turn rate perhaps the targeted cap ship would behave like a gravitational object toward the torpedo. I'm just spitballing here: what's "easiest" or "best" from a dev standpoint is rather irrelevant as I have no insight into such.

Basically their maneuverability is defined similarly to ships. They have a spin constant, which is probably the biggest factor here, along with some other tweakables. Spin constant isn't an absolute thing.. it basically depends on the polar moment of the object, as calculated by the even distribution of mass through the collision hull's shape, as interpreted by the physics engine. Thus, why we have to vary spin constant and damping to different degrees with ships that are long and thin, compared to those short and round (different mass distribution).

Anyway, we can probably have some minimal spin constant that will allow the desired limited-homing behaviour.

As an FYI, I've actually been considering doing this to Avalons for years, combined with some kind of "arming safety" that would basically require them to be fired from a distance. That, along with defensive capital ship weapons that were able to "shoot down" incoming torpedoes, would create an interesting attack/defense scenario. It was this latter bit (missile->laser collisions) that were a bit of a technical sticking point, and I didn't invest the time to solve it.

Of course, additionally, a guided missile in the game also maintains a constant velocity, so "stacking" an attack would not be feasible.