That explains it. Richlands was still a work-in-progress and Ketanot Hills was mainly designed by me for testing new Lua-based activities. The problem is that currently, CC doesn't spawn AI in ships properly on non-looping levels. I know Ketanot Hills doesn't loop, but I don't remember if that's the case with Richlands - either way, there was something wrong with that one from what I can recall. Hopefully that's a bug that will be fixed soon.
As for the gun aiming, that sounds fine for mouse control, but there's still the matter of keyboard control. If it works like the wind cursor, you'll only be able to aim it in 8 directions in keyboard mode, which is imprecise and probably very annoying. I guess I could give it a try when I get some time and see if it works okay.

Assuming you can use the direction of the mouse, couldn't you use A/D to rotate and W/S to move? That way the gun could move in the aimed direction, although you may need a key for the keyboard to speed up the rotation, though you already did that.

how are you supposed to orient a movable gun with four total movement keys

Just use left and right to aim and rotate, then use up to go in the direction of the gun, down to reverse.

That's going to be very clumsy.

That scheme's better than 8-directional selection at least.
I've played worse space shooters.
In general, you can get used to that few control commands pretty fast, or so my own experience would suggest.
I'm pretty sure I am not abnormally good at getting used to control schemes.

That control scheme is pretty backward compared to the standard CC scheme. Personally, I think switching between CC's scheme, the normal computer scheme, AND a third convoluted scheme would be pretty annoying.

And Right you are! I think the idea Samohan25 suggested would work best

or
1. You can drag the mouse around to point it in the general opposite direction from which your cursor is going.

2. once you click it locks it (and the cursor) in place so by moving the cursor you can aim it like a turret.

3. Space to shoot (or something)

Or
1. Same as above
2. once you click it locks the gun in that position but you can still move the cursor around
3. Space to shoot (or something)

also Amazing work on the Lasso (I love it so much)

Awesome mod, just amazing, but here's a quick suggestion for a possible new feature: a copy ability, for terrain and actors.

@Zevn: That requires use of mouse control.

Zevn, I'd still like cross-compatibility to both schemes.
cambiogriz, I was actually considering doing that for the initial release, but it will only sort of work for actors, and terrain drawing would be fairly slow. It's a bit of a pain to set up, but I might do it sometime.

you could pin the gun where someone clicks it after you pick it up. Then it would aim at the cursor.
[for keyboard control this would be the equivalent of a click and then
it aims toward wherever you move the cursor, then there could be a cursor which lets it fire at the cursor]

Workable, although a bit annoying to have to cycle through cursors. Maybe I'll add that in.

That could always be a separate system.

Like this Computer could be like, Sandbox.
And the on for the gun pinning is like. Combat Oriented.

Kinda what I was aiming at but you just explained it so much better