This is just a quick thought about shooting stuff from space ships.
Background:
Something that we’ve always talked about is that gunnery is not complicated by air turbulence or driving across the ground to throw off a shot. Rapid fire weapons might throw themselves around because of recoil, but for the most part, every round is going to behave itself from muzzle to target.
In the warp prototype system, I came up with the idea of dynamic arenas, where there is an interaction area around each ship in which weapon fire can be exchanged - to duplicate the sense of an ICP arena. The radius of this area is 20 ship radii. For a 1km long ship, that’s a 20 km diameter area; plenty of room for engagements. A battleship would have a rather huge arena around it. Note that if you’re a 50m fighter in that 20km diameter arena, your weapons can still travel freely in that area even though your own area is only 1km across.
Well, what happens when a weapon leaves that area? It just goes poof. Nice for data management and acceptable for gameplay purposes. But why does it do that? Well, the fiction is that the ship’s matter and everything in the ship is warp shifted and that the warp drive is creating a field in which that warp shifted matter can accelerate at ludicrous accelerations, move at multiples of c, etc. When warp shifted matter leaves that field (the arena), it destabilizes and goes poof. Stuff can be warp stabilized on its own so that it can survive beyond the limits of the ship’s field, but that’s another story.
The Actual Idea:
If there is a field around the ship that is stabilizing the rounds/beams being fired, then surely that field can have instabilities that mess with the weapons being fired. This emulates atmospheric disturbances. Or heck, even disturbances so severe that they can form essentially physical obstructions.
To start with, I was just thinking that the warp level of a ship would determine the degree of disruption. Moving fast would create more disruption, making combat at speed a more difficult proposition. Pick the disruption that you want to see.
Then there’s the idea that acceleration introduces disruption. Firing while changing speed would introduce the greatest spread or inaccuracies.
Then there’s turning, combinations of the three, and likely other actions. The short form is that the warp field surrounding the ship that makes this ‘bullet’ stabilization possible can be used to introduce inaccuracies in weapons fire - if that should be considered a good addition to gameplay.
This idea can be taken to rather extreme degrees, where warp drives have procedurally-determined hard spots - places where warp-shifted matter cannot cross. This creates both invulnerable places around the ship, but also blind spots for sensors and weapon arcs. A sensor ship would want to find a drive that has no hard spots while a miner might be very happy to have lots of them so that shooting at him is difficult.
These spots may also shift over time. The idea is that you use a 3D noise function for the basic disruptions, but if they shift over time, you go 4D - the same technique used for clouds that form and dissipate. Mix that with speed, acceleration or turning and you might have a really wild time - especially if an experienced gunner can spot the patterns in advance for his ship’s drive.