I had a thought last night, wouldn't be cool or helpful to some mods if it was possible to have a specific weapon load out?

Take the example of a ISD jumping in and you only want it to fire its Turbo Lasers or when a Star Trek ship is added in, only for it to fire photons.

I believe that this sort of control could be done via the special weapons, have up to four spec. slots each assigned to a various weapon set to fire when the weapon is pressed. The reason I suggest such a thing is it could possible add a higher tactical depth. For it to work properly I guess (large) ships would need to be set with only defensive weapons and small light attack weapons, with the big guns set to fire on command. Of course this means more micro management but for those who want it, it might make a excellent edition.

(A more detailed example)

A ship has 3 weapons + Small defensive weapons.
1 Laser cannon, 1 set of turrets and a missile bank.
A spec. ability is assigned to each weapon.
In game you have to press (Timer or release) the button to use corresponding weapons. This would only work well mind for larger ships, to micro every single ship would be a nightmare.

Interesting concept, but can it be done?

I think you can assign a max of 2 special abilities to a ship. Besides that it is possible... I've done that using the rocket_attack ability of the T4b who does essentially that, switching between weapons. Or you could take the Y-Wing Ion Cannon effect... both are similar.

Unfortunately, the abilities' execution can't be changed in the XML AFAIK. However, once it can, you'll be able to have 2 weapon-abilities.

There's also another pseudo way. A ship can have several weapon types. You can configure them to not be able to fire on all targets, and not to fire unless you specifically tell them to.

So for example, an Acclamator will begin to open fire on a Nebulon-B with its turbolasers. However, once you ask the Acclamator to specifically attack the Neb-B, it will then launch torpedoes. However, the torpedoes don't fire when asked to attack fighters.

That's not how it works in-game, but you can make it work that way.