I'm interested in making a new dropship for cc, I was wondering how much is possible.
If I make a sprite that is facing left, can it be shown when the dropship is moving left? The right? and then facing the center when not moving left or right?

Can there be animations for attacks? For example if a turret on a dropship fires can the turret have a 'recoil' effect? Basically I'm asking if the dropship sprite can be told to change sprites while it fires a gun.

Yes, but be warned that pulling that off in a polished way is going to be really, really hard. If you want something to do "Choplifter" style behavior, it can be done, but you'll need to expect to build a lot of custom code. I don't think anybody's ever really managed that one, but it can be done, I think.

Yes, yes, yes (kind of).

But here's major problem no. 1: the Dropship class isn't meant to have any weapons. Why? Because, is why. Why? Quit asking us, kids; write some Lua.

2. Even if you give it weapons, the AI won't know about them and won't use them unless you write a custom AI pretty much from start, which is moderately difficult (it's only a dropship AI, so not really hard if you're a coder and can be bothered to RTFM).

If the gun is an attachable with a script on it, and the actor is a dropship, then the AI for the gun is quite simply locating an actor, looking and firing. Then the regular dropship AI can work ont he craft. You can even code in exceptions for when it is user controlled, and allow the user to operate the weapon.

Sure, like that thing Kettenkrad made.

But it requires custom keys, IIRC, which makes it a possible conflict with non-QWERTY users or people who just don't like WASD.

One of the big problems with the Dropships is that they use the left mouse button to open / close the hatches, instead of either being automatically opened when near ground or simply having another control for mouse-and-key users (say, JUMP / UP) have a special purpose there so that they can mount weapons in a nice generic way.

My point was just that it's not trivial to get it done atm. Sorry for coming on so strong. Just got back from a vacation, not enough sleep

If you don't mind doing turrets as pinned attachables, you could do something similar to to the bethesda. The turrets autofire in the same way that normal turrets will, and can be controlled separately, though that does mean if you're controlling the turret you can't move the dropship. You might be able to get around that by intercepting the movement keys on the turret and applying related forces to the dropship with scripts, but I haven't tried it so I don't know if it'd actually work.

It'd probably use a bit of moderately complicated lua to get working, but theoretically doable, if that's the kind of effect you're after. If you have the gun entirely scripted for the ship, you could also possibly replace the doors with a double-tap down to release cargo, but again that's something I've seen in other attempts and never done myself, so I'm not sure how much work it'd be.