So, on the community projects board, I suggested that currently, while the atlas has a secondary gunner ability, it's usefulness is severely limited in any PvP context as the gunner is incapable of doing the requisite maneuvering required to stabilize their aim.

The strafes seem to come out of nowhere and it's like trying to aim a gun while on a roller-coaster, where you can't actually see what the track is going to do next.

With this in mind, I thought of the following, rather strange, ship variant.

I like to call it, "The Towed Gunner"

Rather than actually sticking a turret on the ship, you have a small orb (say, half the length of a centurion in diameter), connected to the parent ship via the some beam (lets imagine we use the Lightning mine graphic)

This orb has it's own minor strafing ability, as well as a full range of view, but cannot move further than some set distance from the parent ship (So, you can still get tugged around a bit if you're not good at tracking your parent).

Also, any damage this extension takes is received by the parent ship (we explain this away by "energy surges" or somesuch)

I think this could be a really interesting way of implementing a second person while still having that player have some degree of autonomy.

I dub thee "Scorpion"

That sounds really fun. The turrets with gunners are really neat but we haven't used them much primarily because they are, well, pretty useless. A Scorpion would be cool, but faster than that would be a more useful turret weapon. Give it a really solid auto-aim or make it a agt or something like the moth heavies have and it will be a lot more fun.

Thinking about it more, just take a friggin lightning mine, turn it into an extension, and there you have it.

What would be really neat is to have this gunnery mod be available to various ships with a large port.

Gunnery Mod: (additional graphics as above)

L port weapon (Or, possibly, when equipped, it turns an L-port into a S-port, I don't mind letting this crank up the firepower of a ship cuz frankly, it's a multi-person ship, it's SUPPOSED to be more powerful when played by multiple people)

The mod itself gets a single s-port weapon (energy weapons only)
and drains the battery of the parent ship at 0.50 of the normal cost of the blaster.

I have this great image in my mind of a Centaur with 2 of these things spiraling around it in a pitched dogfight with 3 other players.

I dunno about the AGT ones, it's a really boring weapon, the only reason why Moths need the AGT turrets to begin with is that the turret itself can't move, so it's forced to rely on autoaim to be able to get a bead.

As soon as it has some freedom of motion, you can stick a neut on there and it'd still be useful.

suppose the range is 50m from the parent ship. I could see the centaur in my previous example pulling a maneuver where it gets close and then the Scorpions open up on the vulnerable spots on the targeted vulture (from the top and bottom)

How about "gyro stabilization" for the turret. It's aim point does not move with the ship.