Turret

New Turret project

Usage

Guns may be mounted in turrets to increase the tracking speed of a ship's weapons. A weapon mounted in a turret has a tracking speed equal to the tracking speed of the turret rather than the speed of the ship. This allows relatively slow ships to effectively engage fast targets such as missiles and fighters.

Design

Turrets are designed from a button in the row along the bottom of the Population and Production window (F2).

When designing a turret, a beam weapon caliber and type is first selected from your list of non-obsolete researched beam weapons. This means it is necessary to first design and research a beam weapon as a basis for the turret. This can be installed on the turret in a single, double, triple or quadruple configuration. Each installed beam has a separate capacitor for charging purposes.

Next, the amount of machinery needed to rotate the turret at high speed is determined. Your base technology for this attribute is listed at top right and starts at Turret Tracking Speed (10% Gear) 1250km/s. The speed given is the tracking speed for your turret achievable by building a rotation mechanism equal to 10% of your beam assembly's weight. For each additional speed increment a proportional increase in the rotation mechanism weight is incurred. At the starting tech, for example, increasing the tracking speed to 2500km/s would raise the gear percentage to 20% of the base beam assembly weight.

Your Beam Fire Control tracking speed is listed at top right as well, which should guide your eventual tracking speed target for the turret. Fire controls may be modified to track at 50%, 100%, 125%, 150%, 175%, 200%, 300% or 400% of your base speed, so those increments are desirable targets for a turret as well. There is no point in exceeding the fire control tracking speed, as the lower of the two values is used in calculations.

Finally, armor plating may be added to a turret to increase its HTK rating and grant it additional survivability in combat.