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Turret stuff: clarify and converge names to "weapon, tool, and universal hardpoints"


Nyrin

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It's not the highest priority, but it's also not the hardest thing: the verbiage used around turrets can be quite a bit clearer.

Current word choices get the general idea across, but they're very "quirky:"

  • "Turret slot" is a bit awkward. Turrets don't go "into" anything, they get attached to something. The normal aeronautical term for this is "hardpoint" and that's used in a lot of other games. If subsystems can add cargo space, it feels natural that they can add hardpoints, too, and it feels right that big guns could span multiple hardpoints. "Slot" may as well be "thingy," as it's not conveying anything physical or precise about what's going on.
  • The words for describing kinds of turrets can be simplified:
    • "Weapon:" instead of "armed," which is ambiguous (as armed can just mean "active" or "ready"), or "combat," which isn't bad but struggles in having a good comparison word ("non-combat turret" is wordy), describing what the turret is simplifies things. If a turret's main job is to blow things up, it's a weapon.
    • "Tool:" we have both "unarmed" and "civil" in different places right now. Neither of these is ideal in conveying what's intended--"unarmed" can just mean "unavailable" or "inactive" while "civil" is outright unclear. Like before, describing what it is helps: if its main job is to harvest, fix, or move things, it's a tool.
    • "Universal:" the word "arbitrary" carries some very specific connotation of something being random, capricious, and/or meaningless. That's not what we really want here semantically; the idea is that you can mount anything to this hardpoint and "universal" captures that well. "Flexible," "multi-purpose," and a lot of other things can work, too, though I prefer the simplicity of "universal."
    • "Countermeasure:" I don't have a big beef with "defense," but this might be more precise.

This could all feed into some very slick and elegant UI changes (like having a clearer demarcation of hardpoint types and availability in the ship menu), but the naming is a very quick way to tighten things up.

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  • 2 weeks later...

No offence to the developers, but there are quite a few rough edges with wording in the game. Since to the best of my knowledge none of you are native English speakers and you're located in a university town (right next to where I live, no less ; )  ), surely there must be a few starving student native speakers who might be willing to proof-read the translation?

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Disclaimer: not a native speaker, as may be inferred from my previous post.

On 8/10/2021 at 10:28 PM, Nyrin said:

"Turret slot" is a bit awkward. Turrets don't go "into" anything, they get attached to something. The normal aeronautical term for this is "hardpoint"

I kind of agree, and kind of disagree... the way I see it, hardpoints are the actual, physical places on the ship where the turrets get attached, placed by me and designed to encompass the actual turret base, any additional armour around the base, integrity fields, etc.

As such I don't think "hardpoint" would be an unambiguous description for the – for lack of a better term – "system slot" that controls the turret that is in turn mounted to a hardpoint. In my in-universe understanding, the turret control system gets slotted into some kind of socket in the ship's main computer; if not "slots", how about "(weapon/tool/defence) control stations" maybe?

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