The guns look where you look
Flying the Brick Moon had a quiet tax on it. You looked at a target, and the ship swung its whole nose over to shoot — which is also the nose that has to point where you want to go. So you took turns: aim, shoot, swing back, burn, lose the target, start again. Two changes end that. Your guns now ride a turning mount, and your throttle is a lever you hold.
The nose was doing two jobs
Out here the engine is bolted to your spacecraft, so where the nose points is where the ship can push. That is the whole shape of orbital flying, and it is fine — until the guns are bolted to the same nose.
Then every gunfight becomes an argument with yourself. You spot a Cobalt hull crossing below, and the ship rolls its nose onto the firing solution, and now your engine is pointed at your target instead of at the burn that keeps you alive. Fire a burst, swing back, light the bell, look up — and the target is somewhere else entirely. Aiming cost you the burn. Burning cost you the shot. Both took seconds you were being shot at during.
The guns came off the nose
Now they ride a mount that turns. Point the camera at something and the ring walks your barrels onto the firing solution — the same lead mark the sight has always drawn, out ahead of the target on the curve its shells will actually fly — while the nose goes on flying wherever you told it to go. The trigger waits for the barrels: hold it through the slew and the burst starts the instant the guns are lined up, so squeezing early costs you nothing.
Look left, hold the throttle right, shoot. The three orders stopped competing.
The mount is a real machine, not a crosshair — it takes about a second to walk the barrels through a right angle, and the lighter your hull the quicker it swings. The Dart's ventral gun snaps around; the Hammer's barge mount takes its time. Whip the camera hard over and you can watch the barrels chase your eyeline across the black.
One gun stayed put on purpose. The Bastion's 85 mm is a spinal rifle, too big to index, and it still asks for the whole ship: a corvette captain who wants that shell on a hull has to point the corvette. It's the heaviest round in the theater, and buying it with your flight path is what it costs.
The throttle is a lever you hold
The other half of this: your throttle no longer stays where you leave it. Hold it and the engine burns; let go and it shuts. That's the entire rule.
It sounds smaller than it plays. Out here the engine doesn't hold you up, it rewrites where you're going — every second the bell is lit is propellant spent and an orbit changed, and a lever quietly left open at three-quarters is a slow way to lose a round in the ceiling. Now the ship does what your hand is doing right now, and nothing else. Hold to go, release to hold station. Nothing runs on without you.
On a phone the lever is even more direct: the rail is cut into four areas — a quarter, half, three-quarters, full — and your thumb holds one. No dragging a slider a pixel at a time in the middle of a fight; put a thumb in the area you want, burn for as long as you hold it, lift off, coast.
What it feels like
The fight got faster. You can chase and shoot at the same time now, which means so can everyone else — the bots picked it up immediately, and they'll pull a burn to keep up with you while their guns stay on you the whole way. Overshoot a slower hull and you no longer have to choose between correcting your path and answering him; the barrels swing back over your shoulder while your bell does the correcting.
Point the camera. Hold the throttle. Squeeze. It's the same ship, the same merciless orbits, the same shells that fall along a curve — but the controls have stopped fighting each other, and the whole moon plays quicker for it.