Side facing weapons with set firing arcs?

[LogicSequence]

Does anyone know how to make a side facing turret with a firing arc that only allows it to fire at targets on the side of the ship?

Like in this example:

 

[CrazyJ]

with how fast ships turn there would be no real point in that sort of thing,and as far as i am aware there is not way to slow down turning

 

[Pancakelord]

XL weapons (.../Stellaris/Components/Component_templates > 00_weapons_extra_large.txt) have a defined value for their firing arc - presumably because they're spinal mounts (these are the big guns on the tips of titans).

That firing arc - I am guessing - is going to inherit it's neutral position off the orientation of the ship's underlying turret node/bone, as defined either within the 3d model or an accompanying datafile laying out where the ship's emitters (turrets, engines, lights etc) 3d coordinates are (it's been a while since I screwed around with stellaris' 3d models, the details are hazy).

Within this text file we see one example of the "turret" orientation data on a space amoeba mothership, that component is effectively the amoeba flagella hangar launch point. All of the hangars (e.g. in the cruiser.txt) seem to be oriented at 90 degrees, letting fighters launch perpendicular to the ship's line of symmetry.

But, all turrets are oriented in such a way that they will to point forwards by default, so this is a straightforward way of setting up a spinal mount's firing arc.

Now, taking what we know from the above, If you were to:

1. create a new custom weapon slot (e.g. lets call it a "B" slot - for broadside)
2. create a new custom ship section - e.g. a middle section - and then
   • set it's turrets up to face at 90 degrees from the bow
   • define it's turrets as being B slots
3. create a new custom weapon which will fit into your new B slots - e.g. "the broadside cannon" derived from the properties used for XL guns
4. get this all ingame, fit the Broadside cannons into their B slots on your new ship section.
5. pray that the ship AI understands what to do in combat lol

In theory you could skip creating a custom slot type (steps 1&3) and just get the modded ship section to use XL guns on XL slots rotated at 90 degrees away from the bow, but if you wanted to do this "properly" and make a full-fledged/balanced mod, those are the steps that'd be needed.
Maybe as a low effort test, try adding that rotation = 90 line to a existing spinal (titan & destroyer) components just to see if you can get them to fire off at weird angles lol.

I have no clue if the above set of steps are all 100% possible. But having dug through the files I cannot think of any other way you'd go about doing this.

And - assuming steps 1-4 work, there's still no knowing what the combat AI will do if you give it a ship covered in broadside cannons when it normally deals with 360 deg turrets and forward facing guns, only..

with how fast ships turn there would be no real point in that sort of thing,and as far as i am aware there is not way to slow down turning

I also found a reddit thread referencing "combat_rotation" as a ship property from two years ago.
I think I have also seen this used in the past in some mods when i've gone filediving/reverse engineering, as some slow down "in-combat" movement, so this is a hidden property in there, there are scores of modifiers buried away in the game that are simply not used and or explained at all.

Though slowing rotation, assuming that modifier does still work, brings it's own set of problems, and my above point about not knowing what the combat AI will do, still stands.