NovaProtocol

Wiki / Ship sections / Turret

Turret

Screenshot needed assets/wiki-section-turret.png A turret tracking a target, barrel led ahead of it, aim pip on the intercept point.

A turret is an articulated mount - a base, the joints that swivel and elevate it, and one or more barrels - that aims at the current combat lock with true intercept lead and fires bullet projectiles. Its output is bounded by its fire rate, and a mount with several muzzles aims and fires all of them at once.

Turrets draw their aim from the combat lock and prefer a fine-locked section if you have one, falling back to live structure and then the camera ray.

What it can bear on

The mount turns all the way round, so nothing is out of reach sideways. What bounds it is the barrel's floor: it stops ten degrees below level, because below that it would be pointing back through the ship it is bolted to.

Traverse is unlimited and the barrel elevates from 10 degrees below level to straight up, so one mount covers 58.7 percent of the sky and the rest is a blind cone under its own keel. Both hinges turn at 180 deg/s at once, so a swing costs the larger of the two angles rather than their sum - a 90 degree traverse takes half a second, which is 50 rounds the gun does not fire while it is moving. Reach is 200 u: muzzle speed times how long a round lives, not an authored range.

That blind cone is the whole reason point defense is assigned per mount rather than per battery, and the reason a salvo arriving from one side meets fewer guns than one across the beam.

A beaten mount cracks and, past about a third of its health gone, throws sparks - but it loses nothing of itself and it shoots exactly as well as it did new. A turret that had been eaten away would be answering "how is that still firing?" with "it is not, really", and it is. It stops when it dies, and not before.

Loop capture needed assets/loops/loop-section-turret.webm A short loop: a turret slewing onto a crossing target and holding a tracer burst on the lead point.

Variants

Every craft mounts the same gun. There are two turrets in the catalog, they ride the identical mount, and the only thing that separates them is the round they load.

assets/icon-turret.pngTurret - shipped prototypes
VariantDamageTypeFire rateMagazineRechargeMuzzleReachHealth
captureassets/catalog-pdc-kinetic-turret-section.pngPDC Turret (Kinetic)pdc_kinetic_turret_section4.0Kinetic100/s500200 / 3 s100 u/s200 u130
captureassets/catalog-pdc-pierce-turret-section.pngPDC Turret (Pierce)pdc_pierce_turret_section2.0Pierce100/s500200 / 3 s100 u/s200 u130

Raider hulls mount the same two guns. The scavenger grade only lowers the mount's health to 60 (against 130 on a player hull), so an enemy's guns are quicker to shoot off - but every round they land hits exactly as hard as yours.