Please let turrets autofire. While turrets are fun to use now, they are useless in dire situations. In order to use your turret you have to go to mission, slide to the left, and select your turret. This takes a few seconds, so by the time you select the turret you are already blown to bits. It would be nice to have turrets autofire so ships with multiple of them like the "moth" could defend themselves well enough to survive. I know turrets should not become so powerful that people use them as an offensive weapon. This can be solved by having autofire only fire at ships that have fired at you, and have it use up energy. This will be really nice so turrets will be usable. If there is no autofire there should be at least a button that instantly puts you in a turret so it doesnt take 5 seconds to activate it, leaving you dead.

+1, but it should be an upgradable option and not available by default. See Draugath's utility port idea.

-1 We aim at our targets here. It is a choice to leave the captains seat. Hire or recruit someone to fly in your turret or accept the risk to leave and aim the turret.

I support an upgradable version of autofire for turrets. Perhaps a large port module that drains 10-20 power, costing the Trident captain his or her own weapon and some recharge. In fact, that sounds like something nice to play with on a behemoth too.

@OP: It's not completely the same, but I think there is a plugin out there that let's you switch to a turret with a single hotkey.

-1. This is a multiplayer game, captain+gunner is one of the collaboration options. If you choose to solo and don't have a gunner, that's fine, but it has and should have drawbacks.

They really aren't useless in dire situations. I very often lock turbo on then man the turrets to hold off pursuing bots and players.

I do think we need the ability to group and control groups of turrets instead of individually though. This is going to be crucial before bigger ships like Teradons, Connies, etc. can be of any use under player control

@vanatteveldt: That would be TurretHop. On a mobile device like the OP uses, DroidButtons would also be helpful to provide buttons to bind it to.

+1. Great idea. Perhaps tie skill level to the amount of turrets that a player can use on auto-fire. That would allow moths to not be such soft targets. Right now any noob can jump in a rag and pop a moth, why not even the playing field a bit and make "pirates" use a little skill in order to kill traders/miners.

Moths aren't soft targets. XCs are. The vast majority of moths flying around are XCs and don't put up the slightest fight.

Perhaps you just need to improve your fleeing skills, Borg Collective? Learn how to use mines properly, for one.

Why should traders/Miners have to flee? Yes, mines help but when out actively mining the slots used are usually filled with mining beams. The same ship however has unused turret slots because they are basically useless. Why not give an item already in-game some useful function. Turrets could also offer some form of bot protection while mining as well.

Why shouldn't they have to flee? If they were dumb enough to get caught while flying around with no weapons and no backup, that's their problem.

But that's not fair!

Why shouldn't they have to flee? Because with turrets you could stay on course and get a few hits in on a pirate while dropping mines as well.

Because they are being attacked and do not have good offensive capablitity. Turrets and mines and swarms all serve to better aid the vessel in escaping. Hence why only trade vessels have turrets. This after all is VO, not Florida.

Fleeing is too much work and detracts from your idea of a fun game session? Ugh, too many newbs these days want a button that reads, "Press here to automatically kill your enemies and win!"

I get that some people play the game just to trade and mine. However, if you want a peaceful farmville-like game, VO isn't it. Either stop crying and accept the pvp aspect of it, or find some other game that suits you better.

Because with turrets you could stay on course and get a few hits in on a pirate while dropping mines as well.

Could? You mean can. You have turrets and can use them. You can equip mines and use them. These are things in the game NOW.

What OP is asking for is to have the game do the shooting for him.

What OP is asking for is to have the game do the shooting for him.

How dare anyone consider AI assistance! Lets do away with all auto aim, all guided missiles, and all leadoff reticles. Let's remove all indicators of ship armor levels, battery energy, flare ammo counts. Let's also remove any ability to use plugins in this game (goddamn computer assistance!). Computer assisted combat is for pussies and carebears! Combat should be done the good old fashioned way, because this is an old fashioned game in an old fashioned setting. Give me a fucking break, lol.

They should be both AI and man-able. There's no reason this couldn't be introduced into the game along with some balancing factor.

I'm so fucking sick of people complaining about anything that is going to make VO combat easier in any aspect for the sake of some sacred medieval concept that "manual control trumps all".