I have never done it, but the theory is simple.

If you look on the pirate base, you can see a rotating pirate head. Now, imagine if that head was say....a cool turret. You'd have a rotating turret! (no garentees that it actully fires properly though)

So, what you do is, make the ship in softimage XSI (model, UV, texture..ext) (Wings3D is good too)

Leave OUT the part that you want to animate, model, UV and texture that part SEPERATLY.

Then, when you apply Null points to your ship, put one where you want your animated part to go.

Then, make a particle effect, with your model of the part, so that the part rotates (or whatever) the way you want it too.

If you have named everything correctly, and made everything correctly, that theorectly should give you an animated part.

However, the part cannot track or do any complicated movments. Rotation is about the best you can do.

NOTE: I am very weak on the moddeling/texturing part. If you want more help, find the seven deadly sins site, and go to there wiki, they have a couple good tutorials thier. Though, I've never understood them well enough to do it myself..

yes, it can be done with just XSI mod tool and Particle forge.

Though....You may want Gimp to help with texturing, and Wings3D (becouse it is simpler than XSI mod tool). Both are free.

The actual animation is done outside of 3DSmax, but what you do need to do inside Max is get the dummy points positioned, faced and named correctly.

Its quite straight forward when you know how, learning the machanics takes a while cos it involves a few parts coming together and a basic understanding of matrices.

Load up the Pirate Base Skull Flair effect in particle forge and play around with it to understand how it works.

The other interesting effect to concentrate on is the planet elevators as it uses a different type of animation, texture animation. (also used by some of the Starbases).

Really you shouldn't use a particle system to generate these types of effects but seemingly there is no other option atm which is why you see me harp on about Parent/Child sub mesh objects and the ability to control their movement.

Hopefully IC will have need of somekind of graphical effect in Diplomacy which will expand the options, something like a ship being able to grappel or a docking arm or basically anything that can move independantly of its parent object.

No, you don't need 3DSMax, dummy points are merely what Max uses for the Weapons,Exhaust, and other particle effect locations. As XSI is the "official" tool It can clearly place the points as well, but I don't use it so can't confirm that Null Point are what we mean.

You do not need Max to create the effect, its the SoaSE particle system doing the animation not Max.

You use a Null or dummy point to locate the effect that is correct, so in the case of the Pirate Base it will have a Null point from which the rotating skull object spawns or is emitted. Then it is down to the particle system as to how the object moves.

If memory serves these types of effects are called Flair points, so you need to use XSI or Max (doesn't matter which) to create a point called Flair_blah_blah which is then referenced in your effects files.

Dont try to create the effect yourself until you understand how the effect works for the Pirate Base, play with some of the parameters and observe the results. The matrix part comes in when you need to alter the axis of movement....

it would be nice if the devs could, after the mini xpacks are out, make a patch that has moving turrets and pirates that use caps.

It depends how it is implemented, what you cannot expect IC to do is define turrets on all models (its just not worth the effort) what is far far more reasonable and very doable is implementing atleast one turret on atleast one model.

On the subject of scale I have played HW2 high population cap matches with over 1000 units on screen back in 2003 with an AMD Duron 800MHz CPU and an Nvidia Geforce2 GPU which is also something to think about.

I would personally reccomend the TEC Starbase or the Gauss Defense Platform with its secondary cannon (i.e. the gauss gun points one way while the meeson cannon can target other ships), or something completely new like a diplomatic station.