I guess I’m committed, now. It took about an hour yesterday but I managed to get all four main turrets replaced–ironically with the exact same turrets a much older version of the ship carried. Large sections of the prow had to be changed to have the guns fit properly, but the Hipper’s exterior is looking a bit more streamlined in the front, now. The turrets have decent firing arcs. I’ll put up some screenshots sometime this weekend.

Part of the reason I didn’t want to do this was that it brings the Hipper’s required weapon mods from just one to two, and the total number up to five. It might not seem like much, but mods add up extremely quickly. This is part of the reason I pretty much never use Mexpex’s missile mods on anything because it’s just a missile pack.

Ideally the one weapon pack I wind up using per build will have ballistics, missiles, and energy weapons, but most only check one or two boxes. The mods I do use across the factions are all popular enough, but you can’t expect people to have them or want to subscribe to workshop blueprints that won’t work without them. The idea is to aim for vanilla or as close to it as possible and let subscribers decide if and how they want to up-gun the ships.

This is going to be a real challenge to work around, but at this point I just want to finish the ship so I can start focusing on different factions for a while. There may come a point where I can go back and eliminate a mod here and there, but I can’t let this situation hold me up anymore than it already has.