Narwhal still got wrong mounted gun...

Like many others, this is why I don't play naval. Breaking immersion like this just makes it utterly unplayable.

The should also fix those backwards strategic icons imo

Naval is a sad after thought. This is why I choked when they said in the HR kickstarter that most of the art was done. Soooo much art and UI left to do...

Naval is not an afterthought. It is a Stretchgoal. Just like Orbital, Lava and Waterplanets. Or the other 5/6th of GW.
Except orbital is in a few dozen more games then naval so we can expect it to get love before naval.
They get around to it eventually. But it logically has not a high priority.

Besides the priority of naval, this is only a graphics bug. Graphics were never a big selling point for a TA/SupCom game. As most of the time you are so far zoomed out you only see strategic icons anyway.
As long as the shoot hit's it's target, wich side the turrets model is facing does not mater for the average player.

I have to say I disagree with everything you say.

Firstly, naval was promised as a "first class citizen" - meaning it should get as much attention as any other major feature in the game. Furthermore I think that stretch goals are not equivalent with "nice little additional features", but with full-on game features.
Naval is not used in many games because it is in such a broken state, not because people don't want to use it.
Also, there are plenty of people playing attention to the graphics, this is why I asked early on for an option for strategic icon drawing distance, because I hate playing icon wars.
These small things are immersion breakers - and immersion is a huge factor that made TA and Supcom very strong games (TA much more than SupCom in my opinion, but that is a different story).

the problem isn't naval, it's that the planet generation system doesn't generate "good" bodies of water, it generates more small lakes than rivers or oceans, thus you can't move or attack anything with naval usually.

Eh, I don't think so. Naval is really poorly balanced and lacks diversity. Maybe it could be easier to generate nice water maps but it is not the core problem. If you fiddle around it is totally possible to great great water maps with large pools connected by small choke points or more archipelago style maps. Check out some of the water oriented maps on Shared Systems to see what I mean.

I can agree that it lacks diversity, but a good water map is necessary for naval to not be 'useless', no amount of balancing will change this.

The supreme irony is that the only valid naval unit (90% of the time) is the one with a broken animation.

Back in beta I remember that if you spawned next to a tiny puddle, it was absolutely valuable, if not necessary, to put up a naval factory and pump out some bluebottles to give you some serious map control around your base. Also, anything other than a tiny puddle either needed to be contested with naval or you could pretty much just write it off as impregnable by anything other than a concerted and costly air attack.

Basically, naval could and (IMO) should be valuable even with small amounts of water.

Well that's not true at all. Back when T1 naval had far more range it was mandatory to own any strategically placed lakes.

But they're supposed to be more than slightly-less-than-immobile AAs and artilleries.

Which has what to do with anything? You said no balancing would change it, a statement which is just wrong.

If they just boosted the range for the bluebottles, or whatever they call them nowadays, that would be a huge first step in the direction of naval relevancy.

Incidentally, while I always found long-range artillery to be annoying in beta... I really find myself not liking the big range decrease relative to today's balance, not just including naval. But, let's not derail this further.

A range increase alone will not fix the fact that planetary bodies of water need to be connected more by the generator.

I think that without the experience of how naval used to be, it's hard to imagine how powerful long range naval units can be even in a small, but strategically located, pond. But I still +1 for the generator doing a better job connecting large bodies of water. Hopefully we'll have better map tools eventually, and we'll be able to just draw the water where we want.

They used to be powerful, yes, bombardment units as they are supposed to be. I certainly agree that they need their range restored too.
Essentially, they need to be like FA's UEF destroyer.

Which has nothing to do with making naval useful as beta showed. You need to stop confusing the word balance with the phrase how I want naval to work.

Balance and map generation both increase naval's usefulness, connected bodies of water allow naval power to be projected across a larger area, and allows it to be used offensively, thus increasing it's usefulness.

Based on its current stats, yes. But why would you hold a discussion on the assumption of current stats? As was pointed out many times now naval was plenty useful in beta.

There are actually quite a few other cases of this in the game as well.

For example, the Anchor actually has its guns facing horizontally as if to shoot to its sides, and yet it shoots down at the ground. @ZaphodX actually showed this off and talked about it in one of his streams.