Playtest question: "many levels have turrets/cannons that don't fire, aren't
those supposed to shoot at players?" Chased it properly because the enum really
does look like a smoking gun.
engine/MUNGA/VDATA.h:209 declares TurretClassID as the LAST entry of the BT
block -- right after MechTechClassID, immediately before the ND section -- which
is exactly where a real BattleTech class would live. And the mech factory has a
live `case 0xbde:` for it (part_012.c:10186). Both of those point the wrong way.
That enum slot computes to 3038 = 0xBDE, and 0xBDE in the shipped runtime is
ThermalSight: ctor @4b8718, already reconstructed and done in thermalsight.cpp.
Same enum-vs-runtime label drift CLASSMAP already records for HUD and MechTech
at 0xBD6/0xBDC, which is why the rule is to resolve the ctor address and never
trust the factory case label. The case is also in the mech SUBSYSTEM factory
(roster param_1[0x4a]), not an entity factory, so it could not spawn a world
object even if the label were right.
Everything else agrees. There is no `class Turret` anywhere in the engine or the
port. BTL4OPT.EXE contains zero occurrences of turret, sentry, emplac, brain,
patrol, aggro, hostile or npc (the apparent "ai"/"bot" hits are substrings of
failureheat and verticallimitbottom). jointturret, which looked promising, is a
skeleton joint on OWN/PGN/STI with own_tur.bgf -- a mech turret-torso, not a
world gun. And the destructible world classes in CULTURAL.h -- Landmark,
CulturalIcon, UnscalableTerrain -- have no weapon, fire or target members at
all; they take damage and break, and that is the whole of it.
So the turret and cannon models in the maps (TT1/TT2/TWR/TK1/APC, each with a D
damaged variant) are scenery. They did not fire in 1995. Making them fire would
be inventing a feature rather than reconstructing one, and it would need an
entity class, a targeting model and a threat model that the binary has no trace
of -- which is consistent with the standing T1 finding that BT shipped no AI at
all and is PvP-only by design.
Written up in combat-damage.md next to the No-AI section, since the enum is
convincing enough that someone will find it again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
