Boat cannons are super lackluster

[hexagrontley]

in a game where the ocean houses a large chunk of the gameplay, cannons should realistically be very fun and have some utility. evert since they were added to dst, I haven't seen any real use for them, beside doing things that are down right unintentional (chopping trees/killing fish/shadow boat stuff). there really needs to be changes to how they work at their core, because it's a little disappointing. cannons could be such a cool feature. my main suggestion would be to have them fire in a "charge up" mode, where you hold the shoot button, your range increases depending on how long you held it. this would possibly be like a mortar kind or thing, very similar to that one attack the cannons from Rottwood have. this would eliminate needing to be at the perfect distance to get your max damage in, something that currently makes cannons very tedious. Boat cannons are also just such a huge commitment. If you wanted to actually use them, you'd need 4 on every side of your boat, costing resources and causing clutter (you kinda need to do this because if you want to shoot your cannons too different of an angle, you'll end up just trashing your boat). this could easily be eliminated by removing the cannonball's ability to hit things until it's actually landed, something that would end up happening anyways, If they were given a mortar-like trajectory, like I mentioned previously. an extra quality of life feature would also be to give them full 360° turning, just at a slow speed. in this case, they'd work similarly to the steering wheel and mast. in my mind, these changes would make boat cannons somewhat viable, and hey, at that point, you could probably also experiment with different cannonball types, like grapeshot maybe a cheaply cobbled together junk ball. I just feel like there could be so much more to cannons than what we already have. (also please please please just make it so that putting down a rudder makes it so your steering wheel now rotates your entire boat with your mast. the way they work now is so weird, and using them is only a downside, as it gives wavey Jones another thing to annoy you with)