This is an idea I've had kicking around for a while.

Currently, a player can control only a single turret on any ship, whether it be their own ship, a capital ship they're docked on, or someone else's they've been invited onto with /gunner invite. This represents a bottleneck for turreted ships where their firepower is limited by the number of gunners they have. NPCs do not have this limitation as all of their turrets can be independently controlled by the AI.

Suggestion: Allow the pilot to group turrets together and assign them to different triggers for that group, much the same way weapon groups and ports are assigned for normal triggers.

This way turrets that are on the same side of the ship where they can physically aim at the same target can be grouped together. Gunners can then take control of a specific turret group instead of individual turrets and fire different weapons with different triggers. Each turret within that group follows the gunner's aim within it's capable range and fires when the assigned trigger is pulled.

For the turreted ships we have now, this only partially hampers a ship's combat capability, but for something like a Teradon or Heavy Assault Cruiser, having only 4 people on board would cripple it's firepower tremendously.

+1

I'd prefer to have AI turrets, but if we can't have that, then this is a good alternative.

+1

I'd rather have this than AI turrets.

Unless there's extensive player control over what your turrets attack and what they don't attack, they won't really be useful.