Turrets are fairly underwhelming as-is. To actually use a turret you need to either give up control of your ship or you need to get a second player to operate it for you. The first one makes you incredibly vulnerable (ironic, as turrets are suppose to help protect) and the second is generally inferior to having the second player just fly their own ship alongside you. I think they could use some improvements.

There are two main reasons why I want this to happen. The first is gunships. I love gunships and want to see gunships in game, and the first step towards good gunships is good turret mechanics. The second is that I think it could help mobile play, at least against bots, even with just an atlas or a battle moth.

I'll edit this post with any refinements or additional ideas.

1. Semi-auto turrets.
Let turrets be assigned to triggers like weapons are. When fired, turrets would attempt to fire at the player's target. No special equipment needed, but it may be hard to fire at targets that aren't actually in your field of view.

2. Manufacturable auto-turrets.
Bring a normal turret and various parts to a station and turn it into an auto-turret. Let basic turrets like the neutron 2 and gauss be made about anywhere, restrict more powerful auto-turrets to either Corvus or conquerable stations with more advanced parts and some hive drops needed. These would automatically fire at the nearest hostile in a set range, prioritizing the player's target. Toggleable on/off with the fire button. Having a player get in the turret would override these, same how it works in NPC ships.

3. NPC gunners for hire.
"/gunner hire" at a station to have temporary but more easily acquired auto-turrets. These would last until you're destroyed or when you dock after a timer runs out. Same targeting rules as auto-turrets.

For 2 and 3, something would need to be done to try and counter abuse of hostility detection mechanics. (Thanks ARF) I think that it could at least be mitigated by having auto-turrets default to off on launching or entering a new sector, that way it would be tougher to have your turrets accidentally shoot something you didn't want them to. Also no targeting group members in case you are grouped with someone the game thinks is an enemy.

These would automatically fire at the nearest hostile in a set range, prioritizing the player's target.

Things like this pose a real challenge with the game's current mechanisms for determining hostility. It would be very easy to manipulate someone's turrets into doing something bad that they wouldn't be able to correct until it was too late. Sort of the same way Strike Forces and station turrets are abused to kill player Tridents.

If there were some way to assign specific targets it might work.

I partially agree with at least some of this, because when it eventually becomes possible to fly a Teradon, I want there to be a way to properly utilize the turrets.

However, with the ships we currently have it's not hard at all to use the existing turrets in helpful ways. The TurretHop plugin helps a lot (this functionality should really be built-in). It simply provides the command "/turrethop n" where 'n' is the number of one of your turrets. This means you can alias the command and create key bindings so that you can just hit a key and instantly hop into the corresponding turret. Your ship will keep flying at it's current speed as long as you only hop into one turret (if you hop from a turret to another, turbo cuts for some reason). I've used this to fend off pursuit while escaping in my loot-moth.

Good point regarding hostility detection abuse. Gonna add that to the op, plus a few ideas on avoiding it.

I use TurretHop and it's helpful within what we have now, but see my first reason for turrets being underwhelming at the beginning of my post. I don't see much of a future for turrets being truly useful without enhancing their usability.

I used a turret recently to help a new player escape Greyspace.

I really would like the ability to assign individual turrets to "seats" and each seat's "trigger" sort of like how the weapon group functionality works.

I need to type up a detailed suggestions post about that could work some time...

If there were some way to assign specific targets it might work.- ARF01

Perhaps some kind of /whitelist for the purpose of IFF.

Ex: /whitelist add Alura
/whitelist remove westacular

@Phaserlight And nothing in this suggestion would take that ability away.

@Atheme I think an iff whitelist would be a bit cumbersome. Although that does give me an idea to add - turrets never targeting group members, like how mines work.