As of this patch there is a small autoaim area for all weapons including fixed, manual gimbals. Note, this is not the same thing as ESP. ESP allows you to override it in ways the following system do not and never makes your bullets shoot in a direction other than your nose or crosshair, instead it just helps with the crosshair alignment. Notes: The autoaim doesnt exactly match the pip on a moving target, it's probably just using a slightly different calculation like maybe it's including acceleration when the pip isnt or vice versa, but in either case the pip or autoaim location being in sync or not doesn't change the gameplay implications. If you shoot inside the red circle, it will aim somewhere else. Note that the circle completely encompasses the ship. What does this mean for gameplay? First of all, you won't get any manual subtargetting since obviously with the circle being much bigger than the ship, offsetting your aim left or right slightly will all be washed out. If there is ever any pip inaccuracy or lag, you will not be able to manually compensate for it because you will be forced onto the pip/aim point itself regardless of your aim location. Furthermore, by design pips are not 100% inaccurate because projectiles have travel time, the target can change their velocity or acceleration after the other pilot fires their weapon and make shots inaccurate. As a result, the autoaim will often be aiming at the wrong position to actually hit wheras a player could aim at the right position and auto subtargetting won't work either. Testers will likely notice this working well against AI because they barely accelerate and are generally braindead, but against a player who understands how this works you can just spam say up and down strafe and the autoaim will always miss as a result. This is obviously very undesirable, and furthermore completely kills the feeling of control the player has over their weapons in fixed and manual gimbal modes. Essentially, in this system you are not allowed to aim your weapons anywhere within the red circle but the one point it will autoaim to. An entire area around the target is unaimable, completely killing any ability to accel lead, subtarget or compensate for lag or pip inaccuracy. The most glaring thing here is that for many, many patches combat has worked with shots landing and dealing damage reliably without the need for this type of autoaim. As a result of this, we already know for a fact that we don't need this type of autoaim to make shots reliable. This will only serve to mask existing problems and make testing harder and gameplay worse in the short and long terms. Instead, this is just a bandaid on the problems of low ship rotational accelerations, hitreg that doesnt work(I have videos of shooting stationary targets with zero damage application on the IC), poor ESP functionality, and buggy netcode. Despite being a bandaid, this is likely to make these problems worse against player targets in the short term as it prevents compensating for the lag or even getting a "lucky guess shot", and in the long term obviously does nothing to solve the hitreg or other problems. None of this is necessary if the step of making sure projectiles deal damage when they hit the target again is taken.