A Request for Turret Advice

[Tamren Shade]

I want to build a light cruiser with a crazy number of turrets (40+) divided into primary, secondary, and tertiary batteries. Essentially, I want to build the Starmade equivalent of an American WW2 light or heavy cruiser. Part of why I want to do this, is because I have a hard time building turrets any bigger than a typical 2-4 cannon block AMS system.

I've been experimenting with a triple entity system, Barrel-Mount-Support Structure with a standardised "socket size" so to speak so that I can easily change out turret assemblies as needed.

This is an incredibly open ended question, for which I apologise in advance, but what makes a turret effective? Weapon block count? Size? How do Rail Mass Enhancers currently work with turret rails? What combination and number of weapon blocks do people use? How do you mount the damn thing where it looks good AND has a good traverse rate and won't put holes in your own ship or nearby turrets?

Thanks in advance and pics would be greatly appreciated

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

I'll give a list to help.

1) Always remember that the purpose of the turret is the gun, therefore your weapons systems should always be some of the first things you put in the turret.

2) All turrets need power, along with the weapon system you are putting in, try to make the turret power stable (can fire without stopping and will never lose power). Many people disregard the base of the turret as nothing more than a place to put the rail turret dock and the mass enhancers, this is a bad way to look at it. Always try to make the base look good in conjunction with the barrel (obviously), but try to harness enough space on the inside for power generation. I normally have around half of my total power generation for stable turrets in the base, meaning half in the barrel as well. Power is as important as the weaponry, so figure out through trial and error on the shells for the turrets you make what combination works best for each. I normally test my turret power:gun ratio for an hour before I settle when it is a large turret.

3) Always have mass enhancers in amounts where the in game menu will tell you it is 100% effective, it will the turn at the maximum turn rate. You need enough mass enhancers for the combined weight of all your turrets on the main ship, and enough mass enhancers on the base of the turret to support the weight of the barrel.

4) I normally use Cannon-Cannon or Cannon-Beam for my turrets. It is difficult to aim the shots as a person, but AIs will not miss at most ranges. Plus, cannon can be the most deadly primary in the game if used correctly.

5) Place turrets along the spine of the ship that you want to be your primary battery, place the secondaries in spots that the mains may have blind spots, and the tertiaries should just go where ever they can fit as they are most likely the PD systems.

6) Turrets will never damage your own ship, just try to not allow the turret barrels to come in contact with the parent ship.

 

[Tamren Shade]

Thanks, I watched Raiben's review of your heavy corvette, and you mentioned your medium turrets are 6K Mass. Do you mind if I ask the mass of your light and heavy turrets and what kind of firepower you have crammed in them?

Feel free to claim top secret if you want to keep that info classified

 

[Zekester81]

I'd agree with everything Chckn said except #2 power. If you make a really powerful weapon system and you want it to be small, you will have to leave power gen to the mothership. If you do, know that once you are in serious combat, you may lose power to the turret at some point. Power systems can sometimes take more space than you are willing to allot. Now, that being said, I'd make sure at least one group (primaries or secondaries) can power themselves. The hardest ones to power are missile systems with a slave of DPulse or DBeam, or anything with a DPulse slave really. Overdrive slaves also seriously increase power consumption. Seriously though, making turrets self powering IS the best way to go if you can achieve the desired results, power them, and keep it within your size limitations.

Another thing to remember is that Bobby AI can only control two turret dockers on an entity. Adding a third will probably cause issues. You would have to dock a whole separate turret(consisting of two AI controlled turret dockers) to the top of your turret in order for it to work. I have seen some successful large turrets that have their own secondary or PD turret docked to it.

And yes, weapon block/slave/support count is the primary factor in the damage output of the turret. Slave and support can dramatically increase the power of a lower count main weapon at an increase in power consumption.

I'll throw these up here as an example you can play with to see what they all do.
Small Ball turret pack
Zeke's small turret pack
Not all of these are self powering, mostly due to the size, but some are quite powerful damage output wise. They have one base for each pack with multiple barrel/weapon types. They are both zip packs containing a bunch of .sment files that can be imported through the main menu.

 

[Lukwan]

If I recall correctly this little droid is a three-stage entity. The gun-barrel eye and rotating dome are a turret mounted on a ship/body that docks to rail-basic. His head turns to track targets but the body remains facing forward.
PD-3D 'Petey'

A very small pulse-cannon turret built for looks.
Turret for Y-Wing

Slightly larger turret for anti-fighter or Point defense.

BS Turret

A shield nibbler. Use 'target-selected-entity' for a group of these turrets. They will rapidly drain enemy shields and keeps them down so your Alpha damage can get through.
AVN-Rotarian turret

Utilitarian tractor-beam for towing salvaged ships.
Tractor beam Turret

Turret as damage-soak, Alpha damage, and beam-support for mother-ship. Zero-collision design with excellent field of fire,

Eye-Ball turret

 

[Tamren Shade]

The Petey style is what I'm currently experimenting with, a barrel on a ball turret type mounting system recessed into an 11x10x11 block non-moving support structure.

I want to put the power system, rail mass enhancers, shields and a small amount of thrusters into a standardised support structure. I'm anticipating having 3 different sizes of support structure when I'm done, one for the primary turrets, one for the secondaries, and maybe one for the tertiary. I'm hoping that by burying half the turret's systems into the main hull of the mothership, I can push up the turret density of the ship while making the turrets both self sufficient and a lot tougher than the smaller surface mounted systems I've used so far.

The long term goal is to have a modular system figured out that I can use for other ships builds going forward.

How many weapon blocks do people usually cram into turret systems? From building small ships, it seems that a rapid fire cannon under 300 blocks isn't terribly effective, but on the other hand I've suffered a surprising amount of damage while in my 20k mass destroyer from around a dozen fighters using a light 100 missile-20 beam launcher. Though to be fair, that was during the few days after fleets went live when AMS turrets simply didn't work anymore.

Thanks for the links, and as it's storming and I just woke up from a weird dream that I don't remember but left me with an adrenaline rush, I'm going to fire up Starmade and take a look while my heart beat slows down :P

 

[StarWars1981]

Lol. I've started experimenting with turrets too now, never built anything before now large enough to need them. Now I'm working on a station for Light v Dark server, so I can have an outpost. And I need big turrets. Madman and I are working together, and we have one, but I'm curious to know about what's considered an efficient weapon combination. So far, for a medium turret, I have an 82-module beam turret with a shielded base (~7k shields and like 500 regen if even that much) that fits in a surprising compact and nice-looking space. It has no secondary/tertiary effects though, but it's decently effective. I was wondering what I could do, if anything really, to make it more efficient/effective/damaging/destructive/dangerous/annoying-to-large-ships/excellent.
I also have a larger Beam/Beam/Ion with both 100% effects. Any suggestions for that? I don't know module numbers but I think it's close to 260 per. I could be off a bit.

 

[Madman198237]

Around 260 per group is correct on the larger turret. The beam-beam-ion is a prototype standardized turret. I'm going to be refitting it (Read: Build mode one-block-only delete-and-replace modules) to make any combination I need or want.

The ion turret can rake a lot of shields off of a target. Going to be testing a cannon-cannon (Punch-through? Pierce? Overdrive [It's on a station and non-self-powered for space reasons]) at least, maybe also a beam-beam-explosive or similar anti-fighter weapon system.

 

[Lukwan]

Food for thought TS. 40 turrets is already a lot from a lag perspective and each of your turrets is intended to have three entities so presumably they will lag even more than standard designs. It's a good bet that you don't want to grind people's frame rate into single digits so...maybe go for fewer/larger turrets.
I recall my real estate agent telling me why I should look for a bungalow if I wanted larger rooms. He said two story houses have a stairwell eating up space on both levels...leading to smaller rooms. Sunken turrets can affect your ship in the same way.

As for numbers of weapon-modules I think everything is relative. If I am doing a PD array I will use smaller turrets knowing that I will have many individual turrets contributing to the salvo. If I am going for Alpha damage I need fewer and more survivable turrets, hardened and with significant shields. If my nibbler turrets are meant to bring down shields I will use bigger versions but if they only need to keep shields down they can be much smaller. This is like combined-arms tactics; use the appropriate unit to deal with a particular role.

 

[Madman198237]

Another note: A good measuring stick is: If the turret is meant to deal serious damage to combat vessels, can it take out an advanced armor block with armor HP still present? If not, then it might be a good idea to upsize a bit.

 

[sayerulz]

For some reason, my turrets are pointing AWAY from targets, despite both cores being pointed forward....

 

[StarWars1981]

Another note: A good measuring stick is: If the turret is meant to deal serious damage to combat vessels, can it take out an advanced armor block with armor HP still present? If not, then it might be a good idea to upsize a bit.

If not, build it bigger anyways.
I have built a PDT that could oneshot an advanced armor block. Til I tested it and found that an armor value was the missing ingredient that meant it didn't.
Now I have to build a bigger one, dangit, to do damage rapidly.

 

[Lukwan]

For some reason, my turrets are pointing AWAY from targets, despite both cores being pointed forward....

Rrotate your rail-docker 180 degrees. (Or the rail basic it is docked to...the arrows will line up)

It that does not fit your plans try this. Copy the entire turret-base as a template. Delete all blocks except the core then Paste the template back with 180 degree rotation. You will be warned that cores can not be copied etc but that is what makes this work. You end up rotating everything but the core.

 

[sayerulz]

Then rotate your rail-docker 180 degrees. (Or the rail basic it is docked to...the arrows will line up)

But it's already pointing forward...... oh whatever starmade, FINE< MAKE ME BUILD MY TURRETS BACKWAD!

 

[Madman198237]

I've noticed that turrets don't always appear to be pointing at targets they're firing at. Minor glitch, probably.

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

Thanks, I watched Raiben's review of your heavy corvette, and you mentioned your medium turrets are 6K Mass. Do you mind if I ask the mass of your light and heavy turrets and what kind of firepower you have crammed in them?

Feel free to claim top secret if you want to keep that info classified

My light turrets are a very maleable scale. They can vary from 750 mass to around 3000, with DPS varying between 1000 and 15000 depending on what effects and other weapons master trickery I use.

My medium turrets are a significant jump in size and firepower as I see having a light turret being close to the size of a medium turret and so forth a bit stupid. Medium turrets are between 5000 and 10000 mass with DPS ranging from 25000 to about 100000 depending on the stuff I said for lights.

My heavy turrets are where my maniacal tendencies start to shine. Heavies will be between 15000 mass to around 40000 mass with DPS being between about 150000 to 1 million.

After the heavy turret is the mega turret line. Mega turrets are between 50000 to 200000 mass depending on role. The DPS on a Mega will be at least 1 million and can go up to around 12 million on the largest models.
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My light turrets are a very maleable scale.

As an addendum, my mini turrets are all the turrets I make below the rank of light.

 

[zrpizzaguy]

Just as a random question to throw in here. I'm having some trouble building my first Turrets, they point their guns at my targets but never fire they just sit there; and from the tutorial i was working with I thought i got everything right. Any idea's what might be keeping it?

 

[Madman198237]

Do they have enough energy to fire their weapons? Are the weapons computers pointed the direction you intend to fire? Are you sure that the Bobby AI blocks are activated? Are the targets in range?

 

[Chckn Wildstyle]

Just as a random question to throw in here. I'm having some trouble building my first Turrets, they point their guns at my targets but never fire they just sit there; and from the tutorial i was working with I thought i got everything right. Any idea's what might be keeping it?

Probably not enough power.

 

[Bladeriker]

Lots of good suggestions here. I'll add in that I have built both kinds of turrets and for some builds self powering turrets are the way to go, but I have found that most of my PD is powered and shielded by the main ship due to size issues and over all utility.

If you are going for a WWII type weapons config then i would use both and find a happy middle ground that works for you.