Wiki / Ship sections / Turret

Turret

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.

Aiming with lead

The mount aims at your combat lock with true intercept lead - the solution is computed in the shooter's own frame, so a moving ship's rounds actually land - bounded by its yaw and pitch limits and fire rate. Its rounds are sensor projectiles: they deal damage on contact with no physical shove, they carry on through what they hit by the rules of their damage type, and they curve through gravity wells like everything else. The point-defense cannon is tuned to chip a target down over a visible burst rather than delete it, and prioritizes shooting down inbound torpedoes. A mount can carry more than one barrel - a twin-barrel PDC aims and fires every muzzle it has, two offset streams that share the turret's one magazine and its total fire rate (see Variants).

Barrel discipline

A gun fires only while its barrel is actually on the thing it is aiming at. The tolerance is how big that thing looks from here - so it opens as the target grows and tightens as the range does, exactly as a gunner would judge it. The development carrier fixture at a kilometer is eleven degrees wide and its guns can hardly help hitting; the same hull is only three degrees wide to the development skiff fixture at that range, and a torpedo coming in at 800 m is under a degree. Point your mounts at empty space instead - the crosshair with nothing locked under it - and they fall back to a fixed degree of precision, because a mark you invented has no size to measure.

So a mount shoots while it is tracking and holds while it is slewing, and three things follow. Wrenching the ship around mid-burst stops the guns until the barrels catch up. A mount that cannot train on your target at all - the port gun ordered onto something off the starboard quarter, or anything under the keel - simply holds, while the mounts that CAN bear keep shooting. And your battery is looser against a freighter than against the torpedo aimed at you, which is why point defense reads as patient and a broadside does not. It is your ammunition either way; the rounds a gun does not spend are the ones that were going to miss.

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.

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.

Reach and closing speed

A gun is a short-range weapon. A round is not tracked forever: it expires after a couple of seconds, which puts a PDC slug's reach at about 2 km. Everyone shoots the same gun, so a raider's rounds reach exactly as far as yours - what a scavenger-grade mount gives up is toughness, not range. Enemy ships know it - they close to roughly 1 km and fight there, and they hold fire until they are inside their own reach, so a hostile burning toward you is not being polite, it is out of range. Closing speed moves the number in both directions: rounds inherit the ship that fired them, so a charge carries them further and running from your target cuts what they can reach along with what they hit for. Combat puts the multipliers on that, and the engagement ladder sets the gun's 2 km beside the other two families.

How far a round travels

A round's type decides what happens after it hits something, and the two rules are different resources.

A Kinetic round carries its damage as a budget. A round that destroys what it hits spends only what that target had left and carries the rest on into whatever was behind it - so a 100-damage slug that kills a 20-point plate arrives at the next thing with 80. A round that fails to destroy its target is spent on it. Thin destructible cover is therefore a cost rather than a wall, and a slug can never deal more in total than it was fired with.

A Pierce round does not pay for travel out of its damage at all. It carries a separate power budget and spends that on thickness: crossing a section costs that section's full health rating, whether or not the round killed it and whether or not it was already damaged. So it crosses whatever it likes while power lasts, dealing its full damage to every layer, and its total damage happily exceeds what one round nominally carries.

Two things follow from pricing power on the rating rather than on what is left. Light plating is nearly free to rake through while a heavy hull block eats most of a round's power in one go - the spaced-armour intuition, intact. And softening a section with other fire does not open a cheaper hole through it, so there is no trick of chipping first and raking after.

Nothing sits under that budget. There is no ceiling on how many sections one round may cross, so a penetrator fired down the length of a lightly built ship really does chain through all of it - which is the weapon, and the reason thin plating is not free protection against this type. The only thing that stops a rake is running out of power, and the one case that also stops it is a section a mod authored with no health rating at all: a layer that costs nothing to cross ends the round rather than letting it run on forever.

Nothing pierces a rock while its collider remains: an asteroid or a planetoid stops any round of any type at any speed. What a round does to a rock instead is take a bite out of it (see Shooting rock); a planet does not even do that. Torpedoes do not travel through anything either - they detonate.

Trigger discipline

A magazine is a rate limit, not a hard stop while you carry the ammunition to feed it - every weapon refills from your ship's stock of matching rounds, and the rule is the same for all three (see Magazines). What that rhythm is worth is easiest to read on the gun, with the bay and the railgun beside it for scale.

Point defense

Every gun runs its own point defense, and each mount picks its OWN inbound torpedo rather than the whole battery swinging onto one. That is not a fairness rule, it is geometry: a turret is bolted to a hull and cannot depress its barrel back through its own ship, so a mount handed a torpedo coming in under the keel would sit there contributing nothing while a torpedo it could have hit flew past. A mount is only ever given something it can actually bear on; the fire splitting across a salvo falls out of that.

Mounts also hold what they are tracking. Slewing takes real time, so a gun stays on its torpedo until that torpedo dies, drifts out of its arc, or something far more urgent arrives - a battery that re-decided every moment would spend the whole engagement swinging and hit nothing.

So a salvo arriving from one side, or from below a hull, meets only the mounts that can actually train on it - the band above is exactly the band one gun defends. What your own idle mounts do with that, and when the flight computer is allowed to work them for you, is on Combat.

Stowed between fights

A mount with nothing to do does not stand in the wind. Out of combat the barrel swings straight up, the assembly sinks into its housing, and two lid halves slide shut over it - the ship at rest reads as at rest. The gun comes back up the moment it is wanted: weapons hot, a live tracking target, or a point-defense assignment all deploy it, and it stows again only after the guns have been cold with nothing tracked for a few quiet seconds. Deploy is fast and stow is lazy, so a lull in the fight does not park your guns.

The deploy is not free. A stowed mount neither tracks nor fires until it is fully up - under a second, but a real window. Point defense assigns the mount well outside its own kill envelope, so an inbound torpedo meets a gun that is already firing; what the delay actually costs you is the ambush you spring with cold weapons and no lock, where the first trigger pull raises the guns instead of firing them.

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.

Variants

Four turrets ship on two mounts. The gatlings put one barrel on the compact assembly every craft carries; the twins put two barrels on a broader one. A twin's tubes each fire at half the gatling's cadence, so the pair costs the same total rate and drains the magazine no faster - the trade is two offset streams instead of one dense one. Within each mount the only thing that separates the pair is the round it loads. The Pierce guns deal half the damage per hit, so mount a Kinetic and a Pierce and the punch-versus-rake trade on Combat is the only thing you are feeling.

Reach is derived, not authored: muzzle speed times the 2 s round lifetime, from a gun at rest relative to its target. It is nominal travel, not an engagement range - see Reach and closing speed. Every other column is the configured base prototype; a mod can author its own.

Enemy hulls mount the same guns from the same catalog, at the same 130 health, so every round they land hits exactly as hard as yours. A scenario can patch one section's health: the tutorial range armours your own gun to 1,300 so the lesson cannot end by losing it.