Rotatable turrets sound cool, indeed
IIRC, someone was selling special turret counters that had the information for each AFV on them, so you could still see it, instead of it being hidden by a standard CE/BU counter. I can't see myself getting these, but something like that would be very useful in VASL.
Which sorta relates to my original point - reducing clutter. The developers have done an awesome job bringing VASL to where it is today, and it's a good replication of pushing cardboard pieces around on a physical map-board, but running on a computer opens up the possibility of doing so much more.
For example, a lot of the clutter comes from informational pieces like Prep Fire and Def.Fire counters; why not modify the appearance of a squad counter to indicate this? In the same way counters are tagged as "moved", they could be tagged as "fired", or overlayed, a la "berserk" and "wounded". I suspect this might be fairly easy to do (unless it's being done by VASSAL :-/), but if you wanted to get funky, you could modify the counters more drastically e.g. the current 3-man squad counter with rifles raised means "fired", 3 guys standing around with their rifles lowered means "not yet fired" (not a serious suggestion, BTW
).
There's a thread somewhere else (and IIRC, a working prototype) talking about linking counters together, namely an AFV and its acqusition counter. We could have the acquisition counter hidden, but when you right-click or mouse over an AFV, its acquired hex lights up. You might argue that the other guy wants to see, all the time, where the acquisitions are (fair enough), so maybe the hex could be outlined, or something like that, to indicate that it is under acquisition.
Smoke'd hexes (and the counters therein) could be shaded (cf: the board goes darker when playing at night), or have a smoky overlay drawn on top of them. Rubble'd hexes could change the contents of the map hex, instead of requiring a counter.
There are obviously a lot of details that would need to be addressed with things like this, but the point remains: running as a computer program lets us do things that are not possible in the real world. The developers may take the position that they just want a computer-based version of what happens on a real board, which is fair enough, but even given that, I reckon there are still small things that could be done to streamline game-play.
