FreeSpace Port ReCharged Dev Log 06: PDCs!
- Iain 'Sessile_Nomad' Baker
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
Welcome to 2026 friends. I hope you all had a great Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus, etc. and a Happy New Year.
We have seen how I upped the ante when it came to the guns the various fighters and bombers are equipped with. So now players can channel their ‘inner Maverick’ and ‘Go for guns’ while unleashing a hailstorm of space boolets, plasma, and handwavium projectiles. Happy days all around. Unless you were on the receiving end of course…
So, what about the point defences of the game’s various freighters, transports and warships? Did their ante need upping too?
Absolutely! In fact, they needed upgrading even more than the guns of strike craft did.
'Basic Blobs'
There were several reasons why the turrets of warships and the like needed significant tweaking and improvement.
For a start, the rate of fire for most of them was painfully slow - as in 'one shot every one-to-two seconds' slow. Compared to the 100 shots per second of the 1960s era Vulcan, this was pitiful.
Secondly, their projectiles moved at a snail's pace. Whereas IRL Close In Weapon Systems (CIWS) weapons have muzzle velocities of Mach 3+, these ‘blob turrets’ (as they are colloquially known) had muzzle velocities of only a few hundred meters per second, making them easy to dodge, and not very effective.
Vanilla FreeSpace Port - Mission 06 - Paving The Way
Combined, this made the point defences of most craft a minor inconvenience. They were often an annoyance but seldom a serious threat to the player. This itch would need scratching, too. I wanted Point Defences to be something the player would need to be wary of and plan around.
What's it shooting?
There was another reason as well, which was recognition. According to the info in the game’s weapon table, most turreted weapons on human vessels came in two distinct flavours.
The first one - the 'Terran Turret Weak' was allegedly based on the game’s starting fighter gun, the ML-16 ‘laser’, which was hopeless against shields. As such, the Terran Turret Weak was similarly ineffective against the shielded enemies that would appear around 1/4 of the way through the campaign. This is what most early game vessels were armed with, which made them easy prey for your new foe.
The second one - the 'Terran Turret' - was based on the Avenger cannon - a roughly mid-game fighter weapon that was far more effective against shields. Vessels from the mid-game onwards were armed with these, which made them far more capable of defending themselves against shielded enemies.
The problem was that neither version looked, sounded or acted like their fighter-based equivalent. What’s more, the two looked nearly identical. This made it almost impossible to tell what a craft was armed with.
FSPort Vanilla Blob Turrets
In the video above, you can see the player shoot the ML-16 (purple/blue) and Avenger (yellow) cannons. The guns on the cruiser are supposed to be based on these. But do they look like them? Or act like them? Also, could you tell that the cruiser was armed with two different types of blob turrets? If so, you have better eyes than I!
(The missile launcher at the bottom doesn't count.)
PDCs!
The solution - create turreted variants of the three main fighter-based weapons, the ML-16, Avenger, and the late game Prometheus. These actually look, sound and act like their fighter-born siblings, so you can tell at a glance what a craft is armed with. This helps with visual storytelling too, since you can see the allied fleets becoming increasingly better armed as the campaign progresses.
ML-16, Avenger and Prometheus PDC Demonstration
A Numbers Game
One slight issue I ran into was that because most of these turrets were single-mounts, their damage output was less than a fighter’s, which might have between two and six such guns. The solution - give the warship-mounted turreted versions a small boost in range and power - just enough to make them effective, but not so much that the warships no longer needed guarding, since that would be boring.
I named these weapons ‘PDCs’ - short for 'Point Defence Cannons' in honour of the similar weapons in The Expanse franchise, which is one of my favourite sci-fi franchises of recent years. (If you haven’t read the books and/or watched the show, then I highly recommend doing both 🙂)
Smaller vessels like freighters were given PDCs that were identical to the fighter-based versions, so they did not become overpowered. I wanted defending such fragile vessels to remain a nail-biting experience.
Sentry turret platforms - which are free-standing and don’t move - were given PDCs that matched their fighter-grade counterparts in terms of power, but had greater range to compensate for their lack of mobility. Therefore, they could start shooting you before you could return fire. This made attacking them a daunting proposition if not handled carefully.
Together, these made being within PDC range of these vessels a danger zone that not even Maverick (or Archer) would want to be on a highway to, since death would follow very quickly.
That’s all for this week, folks. In the next post, we will see what these changes have made to the threat posed by bombers. See you all there.
Previous dev log posts
Iain is a 40+ author and gamer from England, who started his gaming journey on the Atari 2600 36(ish) years ago. His specialities include obscure cult classics, retro games, mods and fan remakes. He hates all sports games and is allergic to online multiplayer. Since he is British, his body is about 60% tea. He can be reached via email at nomadsreviews@gmail.com
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