/lit/ - Literature

>>22760394
>1)
Depends on realism. Are you hardcore and working under the Tsiolkovsky rocket equations? Ignore the mass of the weapon housing. How do you justify carrying all that ammunition?
Quad mounts imply you are fighting at world war two visual air defense ranges. That's kinda iffy to anything pretending to be scifi these days. Speaking of visual, where is the A.I.? Even an Apollo era flight computer can calculate interceptions, error correction, and highly efficient allocations of ammunition. And, it does all this better and faster than any human.
If your system is more along the lines of: push lever to make ship go whoosh, push harder to make more whoosh, etc., well.
In both cases it's probably better to stick close to the characters and describe how they see the weapons, or experience the weapons. I've been entertained by authors who are vague about how some ship weapons work until, more than halfway through the series, a main character operates one.
In my own 'verse ship weapons don't have firing triggers. They have safeties. You power it up and consent to letting it do its thing. And, I consider my 'verse to be closer to the lever pushy soft end of the scifi scale.
>2)
Save the erotica scenes for when you get stuck. Or:
>>22760529
Yeah. Avoid outlining. Have the characters figure out what to do and where to go for the goal and write what they come up with.
Or, you know, divert them with some drive-by hawt alien perversion.