Slitherine

can the turrets on the ships clip when they fire? that is, can they shoot through other turrets and parts of the ship model they are mounted on?

i'm curious, because the various lets play videos don't really give a good enough look to tell, and if they can, that would effect the ideal angles of fire for getting maximum firepower out of a ship.

given the ships seem to be using the actual hull shapes for collision detection rather than some 'box' i suspect the answer is "no"

It sure looks like they can shoot themselves. In this clip the top guns looks to be hitting the ship they are mounted on.

https://youtu.be/oN9d7sHV1R4?t=44m8s Timestamp 44M8S

so the answer is "no, but the game AI doesn't know that"? kinda funny.

does reinforce the fact that ships like the jupiter and Artemis classes are broadside craft.. the prows block fire directly ahead due to their shapes, so if you want effective shots from the big guns you need to firing out your sides, at a target a bit above you.

actually, pretty much all the colonial craft are broadside ships. (even the manticore, given its missiles)
make me wonder why the lets play people alwyas deploy 'line abreast', which is the worst way to deploy broadsides.. ideally you'd want a 'line astern" formation with ships in front of each other, so the ships don't block with each other's fire arcs. (i'd talk about 'crossing the T" and other basic principles of broadside fighting.. but the AI cylons only seem to come at you in a 'loose swarm' formation so there is generally no T to cross. might be something to try and program the AI to fix in a future update)
actually, the best formation would be a 3D version of the line astern, where you have layers of ships in line astern formation, each layer over another. this create what scifi writers call the "wall of battle", allowing you to compact a large number of ships into a smaller space and get overlapping fields of fire in three dimensions