Instead of turrets, couldn't we have automatic 'Defensive Lasers' (pulse, beam, military) on Port and Starboard sides that would do the same thing as defensives turrets?
The turrets work quite similar to automatic lasers with a shorter range. The catch is that the ship design need to include the turrets but as you can see at your Dark Rainbow they could be pretty useful.
Turrets on a player ship will automatically open fire if you are locked on an aggressive ship in range. As they are designed as SubEntities the slots for lasers are still available. Range, fire-rate and fire-power could be individually designed for each turret if required.
So checking the ship date,list, the keys I see that would or could be used are:
Auto-weapon fire, subentity, ball-turent, and then locations such as aft, port starboard.
Of course I know nothing about coding or writing script.
I think it's possible to have a "turret mode", in which the pilot virtually takes control of a turret, taking down hostiles, while the ship carries on with its trajectory, like if it were on auto-pilot.
YES! the Panther Clipper was that ship! Sadly lacking from oolite...
I could be wrong (been ages since I looked at the turrets code), but I don't think you can just slap a turret on a ship after it has been spawned. You probably need to define the turrets as sub-entities for each ship you want them to appear on. Maybe someone has found a way to do it by script that escapes me, but my recollection is that it can't be done universally.
FINALLY GOT MY PANTHER, but disappointed it doesn't have turrets.. I have looked in shipdata and it referenced turrets but they aren't there and no weapons can be assigned. My only reason for wanting a panther was to stick top and bottom guns as its a brick and not manoeuvrable!
