Illuminatus Primus wrote:Its swiveling capability is quite beside the point when its line-of-sight is tightly restricted by a narrow gunport. Its totally ridiculous for flak weapons; such weapons need a very broad engagement envelope and a fast response time - so they must be relatively light and easily reoriented against multiple, fast targets. They also need to have high rates of fire to increase kill probability against small and fast targets.
A better idea is they are hastily-added-on modifications in order to increase anti-surface bombardment capability with a variety of mass driver payloads. That removes the rate of fire and line-of-sight problems. Maybe the Venator's analogs are similar, who knows. Perhaps against some targets volley fire from a large battery of individually-limited-line-of-sight light guns is the best solution, compared to a smaller battery of more traversable guns or larger guns?
Perhaps the Invisible Hand's gun deck is of the type I speculated, while the handful of small crewed-guns aboard the Venator are volley batteries designed to provide covering fire in the event of other batteries failing? Perhaps they are low-watt volley batteries for use when a Venator is groundside for defense, since the primary and secondary guns would cause extreme mass-destruction events? Or how about synthesis: we know Skywalker and Kenobi have taken some personal touches in applying modifications to their armada. So perhaps there are close-in blind-spots in the Venator's CIWS defensive coverage, and they built superficial battlements in those blind-spots, mounting crewed surface guns in the battlements' gun deck and using volley fire to fill-in the gaps. When a ridiculously close trajectory takes the GRS Guarlara obscenely close to the CSS Invisible Hand these special-purpose and improvisational weapons add considerably to the available broadside fire between the two ships.
Want to know what's funny about this kludgy rationalization? In Babylon 5, the almighty Minbari warships fire through "gun ports" on their hulls rather than turrets, which is exactly what you're trying to rationalize here. And legions of Babylon 5 fans never saw even the slightest problem with that, or any need to rationalize it.
There's actually plenty of other ways that one could rationalize them, other than what you've done here. For example, you cite their use at very short range; one could just as easily say they were meant for use at very
long range, where you wouldn't need the gun to traverse large angles. And one might argue that the reason for their internal mounting arrangement is so that they can be easily swapped out for different kinds of guns by the maintenance crew in-flight, depending on what they plan to do today (we're talking about a Swiss Army knife ship, after all).
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