We currently have a very limited range of turrets, particularly non-capship turrets. Creating individual turrets one-by-one with their own unique stats is a task that could take years, possibly never happen. Hence, this suggestion, so speed up the addition of new turrets to the game.

The Convert to Turret option

Basically, all non-guided weapons can be reconfigured as turrets. These turrets would not be inventory items, and not exchangeable. How it would work is, when you select a given weapon and a turret slot, it would give you an option to "Equip as Turret". The process will cost 2 million credits + 5 crystals (when applicable). Unequip the turret and it gets back to being a normal weapon, and re-equipping it as a turret again charges this fee. Again, to make it clear. The items are just weapons that are already there, not new ones. No new items need to be created with fresh stats. Just a button and a system to add these various blasters, cannons, rockets and guns to a turret slot.

Small port items converted to turrets will use 4 grid. Large port items converted to turrets would use 6 grid.

The suggestion would hugely widen the turret configuration possibilities. And with minimal work on new stats and new inventory items. Potential configurations where people might complain:

Tri-AvalonTurret moth in furballs. Imagine the devastation if someone botted it to continuously fire all turrets, infinitely reloadable. Personally I'd enjoy it, but I have to admit having huge balls of destruction flying around the place is kind of alarming.

Tri-ScreamerTurret moth in furballs. Larger detonation prox and faster, but lesser damage. Again not something most people would like.

Can't think of more at the moment, I'll just leave this suggestion here for feedback.

The reason why we don't do this, is because it's fairly easy for capital ships to become hideously overpowered, with certain weapon configurations.

Creating "individual turrets one-by-one with their own unique stats" is only a significant task specifically because of the balancing that has to happen. Balancing which your system would completely.. not have at all. We could just re-create all existing weapons as turrets in about a minute. That part is not difficult. The hard part is the bit you want to completely avoid..

The whole reason why we have grid power is specifically so people couldn't do this (originally just for normal addons, but doubly true for turrets). And such that weapons can be made that demand significant tradeoff, like a super-powered weapon that can only be equipped solo, etc.

So, I appreciate the idea, but no, we aren't going to do this.

"The reason why we don't do this, is because it's fairly easy for capital ships to become hideously overpowered, with certain weapon configurations"

incarnate I respectfully disagree with this statement... any feature that is available to all players is self balancing... also capships should be "hideously overpowered".. players should get nervous when they encounter a capital class ship

also capships should be "hideously overpowered".. players should get nervous when they encounter a capital class ship
Disagree. Capships are strong enough as they are. They are supposed to have downsides to their very significant upsides, which make them vulnerable even to non-capships. Buffing them just makes capships a necessity rather than a convenience, where whoever has more capships rules the roost.

incarnate I respectfully disagree with this statement... any feature that is available to all players is self balancing...

This game is not entirely based around PvP. There are item-drops from NPCs, higher-valued minerals whose extraction comes with increased risk, convoys that can be plundered, etc. This content is designed with a "relative" level of difficulty, which is ballparked against a range of expected player capabilities. Unforeseen and unexpected capabilities (which stem from "total weapon flexibility") often leads to significant balance problems.

It was relatively recently (not even a year ago) that we had to do a major investigation of drop rates and turrets, due to the abilities of certain capital ship owners to exploitatively "farm" NPC drops at a much higher-than-expected rate.

My statement wasn't even solely based around capships, either. For the longest time (before grid power), we were really limited in our ability to make high-powered individual weapons, because everything would be quad-linked on a Hornet and turned into something wildly overpowered.

There have been dozens of historical situations that have demonstrated these issues, and "fixing" them is often really time-consuming and problematic for us, the developers.

But, even more fundamentally: "any feature that is available to all players is self balancing" is pretty naive, even in a purely PvP environment. This isn't checkers, or even chess. People are making major trade-offs of character and nation and combat strategy. It shouldn't be a requirement for everyone to go get "The Same Strongest Ship/Weapon Config" to be competitive. That's why trade-offs exist. Limiting factors, like grid power, mass, energy, and port-size are knobs that are available to turn, to make trade-offs more interesting.

Such a great response .. thank you incarnate!

Then a all flare rag comes in and one shots everything