As long as you can live with a hemi-sphere fire arc you can do it, the problem you'll find is that on certain designs even this makes weapons fire through the hull and do some pretty strange things. To avoid this you have to place the weapon emitters at the extremities of the ship mesh.

The other thing you can experiment with is weapons as abilities, for example a Kol Destroyer will line itself up perpendicular to the tangent of its target before firing the gauss gun.

You can also add timing to the weapons banks, but you cannot to my knowledge restrict certain banks at specific times other than introducing a delay.

I'm not worried about how it looks just yet. I figure I'll get the gameplay I want ironed out, then worry about getting the graphics/sounds to match.

How does one set up a hemispherical firing arc?

Also, how does this timing/delay system work? Can you add a delay to all weapons on the ship whenever any of them fires? If so, that would mimic the behavior I'm looking for fairly well. I haven't seen anything that brings this system to mind... which means I could probably do some more research into it tonight when I get home.