FR: Flag or Profile option to allow ships to use primaries to shoot down interceptable missiles/bombs pursing them.

[DefCynodont]

If it's not too much trouble, Myself, (as well as warmachine and possibly BtA) have a use case for fighters to shoot down bombs that are chasing them. Currently the AI doesn't know how to use it's primary or secondary banks in self defense against bombs or interceptable missiles that it is under threat by.

Ideally, this flag/option would allow fighters to shoot at pursuing interceptable/bombs under certain circumstances, some examples:
if the fighter has no chance to evade,
if it is already directionality facing the bombs,
if it has long range weapons and the bombs are far away thus giving the fighter has enough time to turn around and shoot.

Additionally, allowing the "glide attack" move (as documented in $Glide Attack Percent:) to be used to target a pursuing bombs when the requested feature is active, would be very swell and greatly appreciated.

How feasible would this be? Please and Thank you in advance.

[Goober5000]

This is theoretically possible, but may require a lot of work. The AI code is pretty complex, and even simple upgrades (such as to ai-stay-near-ship) can require changing many bits of code in many functions.

At first glance, what would be necessary to implement this behavior is to look at all the places evade_weapon() is used, then add new logic to chase the weapon rather than evade it, subject to the conditions you mentioned. It would probably be cleaner to add a new submode, SM_CHASE_WEAPON, rather than overload SM_EVADE_WEAPON with special cases. To further complicate things, there is also a top-level mode, AIM_EVADE_WEAPON, that would need to be changed in the same way as the submode.