NOTE: I want to be clear that while much of this is subjective and you may enjoy turrets simply for fun my goal was to ensure everyone understands the huge drawbacks when using turrets as your primary damage source. As for my joke about being disabled I spoke with Jerry before including that and he thought it was great so I hope you do too. I'd never make fun of anyone with a disability as here I'm intending to make fun of these weapons.

Late but relevant. "Some people berate me for having turrets on my ship, but it's ok, those people are dead now." - The Pilot

“Hot garbage” Same can be said about my aim

This rule doesn't apply to the Type 10 though, which is a flying fortress with minimal turn rate and uses modded turrets to create an 360° death zone for attackers.

I think using turrets on the small slots on something like an anaconda is advantageous specifically for keeping a small amount of damage on things like eagles and sidewinders that will otherwise spend a lot of time in your blind spots

as a low vision gamer, I would like to thank you for validating the reason I use turreted weaponry. I use them for target tracking. It's difficult for me to follow my targets due to my vision, so I follow the bright flashing lasers that a pair of class 1 pulse lasers provide me with. They're like my little target painters. I don't expect them to do damage, let alone hit the target, I expect them to show me where my target is :)

Thats a good tip with the gimbal to untagged and it goes fixed. Did not know that. Thanx.. ✌👌

I feel using turrets in conflict zones for extra tagging purposes should have been mentioned.

You didn't do any hard analysis on time on target. While I know this varies massively depending on the ships involved and the pilots, it's impossible to reach a firm conclusion on this topic without such data.

You don’t mention Damage per Energy at all in the entire vid. A turreted weapon has about 25% higher DPE than a gimballed one. If you emptied your WEP on a target using all gimbals, you would do LESS total damage than if you had all turrets. There are PROS and CONS to using turrets. I don’t think you should completely write them off. I use two on my Cutter, on the wings, and they’re great for applying debuffs. They also have a role in some setups where you can’t fit a hardpoint into one of your 2 triggers (ex: Chieftain with 2 Large Plasmas and 3 Small Railguns. That Medium hardpoint all alone at the bottom of the ship makes a good turret if you ask me).

"They can also be used for the roughly 7 or 8 players who actually use multicrew" 🤣🤣🤣 I remember when I started playing and me and my buddy saw that option and Googled what it did and were like... so wait... one of us just sits and watches the other player play the game?

It begs the question: Why can't you fit a weapon of the size class used on a gimballed mount - ostensibly a limited 'turret' mount already - on a full-range turret mount? The way ED balances the weaponry, and insists this is how military technology developed in their universe, doesn't make much sense. Modern militaries have invested plenty of time and money solving these conundrums themselves - and 'gimbal-mounted' weapons as they appear in ED simply don't exist in the modern day, because of the time and research that has already been made making turrets as effective as possible specifically *because* of their mobility and versatility in engaging opponents. To insist that space-faring combat entirely disregarded and discarded all that time and energy into making turret-mounted weapons as effective as possible simply doesn't sit well with me. This of course has no bearing on the fact that you're right - in that ED's mechanics all but punish anyone who has fallen to the same conclusions and misplaced logic that I have.

I like turrets because they make me feel like I’m piloting a big ship. I don’t want to dogfight a ship that’s 10 times smaller than me, i like fitting the Anaconda with only Turrets and watching them do there job. Also the limiting factor for me is energy. So as Long as the Energy efficiency is equally good it should not make a difference right?

Man I wish You had made this back when I was just starting to understand combat, I had switched to gimbals and was wondering why I didn't have the "fire at will" anymore I thought it was something I had done. Man I am so glad there are people like you and quite a few other's that are more then willing to make content to help out new comer's to the game.

I feel special now, because I'm one of the eight people using multicrew with my friends. I always got always one turret on my multicrew capable non-exploration ships.

Videos keep getting better and better. I love the tracking on the onscreen popups.

That’s one of my main problems with Elite Dangerous. Tracking for gimballed and turreted weapons is nothing but a bad joke. From a realistic standpoint the only “ships” that make sense having fixed weapons are the SLFs. For most ships turrets should be standard, but i guess Frontier wants to keep us dogfighting with fixed weapons in giant ships that absolutely dwarf a jumbo jet.

I use 2 class 3 fixed engineered beams and 3 gimballed engineered (1 class 3 and 2 class 2) MC's 1 with the corrosive effect on my current combat ship a python. Always seem to learn something new when I watch your videos. Keep up the great work. O7 👍🏼👍🏼

In case anyone got picked up by youtube algorithm 2 years later. Turreted weapons are conditioned for: 1. Do you already have a primary and secondary weapon that's constantly being used and you still need a third? Yes? Is it a Medium or Small hardpoint? Yes? Then use turret for your third. 2. Is it a weapon for its function, like scramble spectrum or long vent, not for damage? Yes? Is it constantly on? Yes? Use turret. 3. How much of time is your hardpoint firing at the enemy? Less than 70% of the combat time? You're not constantly facing the enemy? Is it a Medium or Small hardpoint? Yes? Use turret. 4. Is it a crappy location hardpoint? Yes? Use turret. Unless you're using something like plasma or railgun, do understand anything that's Medium or Small hardpoint don't really matter on damage due to their low penetration. If your hardpoint sucks at forward fire, for example Corvette's LMM hardpoints or Cutter's wing MM hardpoints, Anaconda's belly SS hardpoints, they're excellent turret locations. For ships that have good forward fire hardpoints, like the alliance triplets or almost all the medium and small ships, they don't need turrets, this is mostly a large ship issue.

That was a great rundown. Definitely situational. I usually have one when flying a large ship only to knock out fighters and very agile, smaller craft.

Exigeous is my favorite Elite Dangerous youtuber hands down, his content is always to the point and never drawn out. Keep it up man!

Just got back into the game, glad you’re still making awesome videos

Very nice video, and compelling argument! I appreciate the graphic analysis as well.

Thanks, nice explanation, I like your videos as they are to the point, with no messing about and easy to follow

The different weapon types are so ridiculously unbalanced. Weapons shouldn’t do less damage because they’re gimballed or turreted, especially given the additional cost. The damage should remain consistent, and it should be power draw and heat that’s increased when using gimballed or turreted, which makes even more sense when you consider that the ships that would need aim assisted weapons the most are the ones who would have the larger power plants and distributors and could absorb the higher costs. In contrast, smaller, more nimble ships like the Vulture can rock fixed weapons more easily. Those should be the drawbacks, not reducing damage so much that they become useless no matter the circumstances.

One strategy I thought to experiment with turrets was to use them with a fighter bay ship so that the ship would be an automatic threat whenever fighters were used

Very informative Exegious as always.

I just use them because they look cool. There's just something immersion breaking about having fixed weaponry on a large space ship. And I write off the fact that it takes me 3x longer to kill anything as a result as simply an extra level of challenge difficulty for the e-cred.

Very helpful though you inadvertently answered a question that I had which I found most useful as I was trying to figure out whether or not I wanted to keep the 2 grade 5 hicap/corrosive multi cannon turrets on my Corvette for the specific reason of keeping the effect going active.

Thanks for the breakdown! Did you take in consideration that with turrets, the constant damage removes shield regen off ships? A small turret can be helpful then as well. Or with the Cutter which has such a bad pitch speed that it's top Class 3 weapons could benefit from turreted weapons?

I'm not totally convinced, though my next project is to engineer more weapons to see what happens in practice - my opinion for the longest time has been that the Cutter is probably as effective if not more with turrets on top, because at that point you have effectively 100% uptime on 2x large and 2x small mounts firing at a target owing to its great roll speed and the good DPE of the turrets. The huge has to be fixed or gimbal, and your job when flying one is to bring that to bear - but unless turret accuracy is really THAT awful compared to fixed or gimbal, the effective 100% time that the target is in your threat zone feels like it most likely outweighs the higher (but less energy efficient and harder to converge) damage of other mounts.

Your content is fantastic, fast paced, packed with specific data, one if my favourite for quick info on almost anything. The only problem here is the title I think, although it's ok to express personal opinion, saying that might hurt some turret lovers. XD I did use them on my barely engineered Krait mk2 together with plasma accelerators, while I try to hit the target or try to stay out of their fire, turrets bring down the shields. Together with a SLF it allow me to earn some bounty vouchers that I need to unlock Todd and, iirc, will then allow me to unlock Jean, that I'm in love with. XD

Are there certain hardpoints on certain ships that are better with turrets? Or are all better suited to be gimballed as the vid says. I'm planning to move a few to fixed and have no turrets but I wondered if certain hardpoints with certain weapons may be somewhat limited without being turreted.

Wouldn’t turrets be ideal for larger ships like the Anaconda which have incredibly slow turning rates? For instance, I find myself getting caught up in jousting matches when enemy ships end up behind me and I feel like having at least two turreted weapons help keep the damage output going. Other than that, any rebuttals as to why I shouldn’t use them are explained in the video, so I agree that turrets are very situational

I totally forgot multicrew was a thing, what an underutilized feature

I've been using turreted weapons and I haven't even been using the 360 firing function. Thanks for the video this will save me a bunch of credits.

Speaking of the "higher skill ceiling" weapons such as Plasma Accelerators, what would be a tl;dr version of what to focus on? I'm sticking to the basics with lasers to attack shields and multicannons to attack hull, and I'm wondering about switching to different weapons. The drawbacks of limited ammunition on missile launchers and so on kinda make me shy away from experimenting. I wouldn't consider myself skilled at all, but sometimes it does feel like it takes too long to destroy ships with say, two small lasers and one medium multicannon on an Imperial Eagle for example.

im sure this has been asked, what color settings are you using for your HUD? i absoutly love the look of yours and cant get mine quite right

Hello, I haven’t got very good English. can you please tell me which one is tracking target to shoot? Gimbaled, turreted or Fixed??? I want to upgrade them to which can track and shoot the target. Thank you.

Do the fixed guardian weapons have micro gimbal? as I never notice any movement when using them on my corvette.

i agree for the most part but on some ships like the type 10 defender unless u can face ur enemy while piloting the brick they are usually helpful as a deterrent because its hard to chase a ship thats firing at u backwards

Flying around in my Eagle I like using cannons, but having that turret on top has definitely helped while I'm busy focusing on flying.

the problem i have is using 3 or more types of weapons, i need to put in the case of threee 1 type in turret because of the hassle of constant fire mode switching

Awesome video as always! Been using turrets on my big 3 with a gimballed multi cannon for their huge HP since I got them. Never had any trouble mowing stuff down. I knew they did less damage, but wasn't aware it was that much less. Still, I play with mouse and keyboard, which means flying with FA off is very difficult. So turrets help! Plus, my wife and I are always multi crewing. :) So we're 2 of the 7 - 8 people multicrewing! :P

So what’s a good gun setup for a T-10? Since the ship is as maneuverable as a soccer stadium and the hard points seem setup specifically for turrets. I’m curious what the non-turret builds are like on that beast.

Thanks for the video. I agree with much of what you say, however there are a couple of additional benefits to having one or two small turreted weapons on your ships. First of all, if you are using fixed weapons for primary damage, having at least one turret will affect NPC behaviour as they are more likely to swing away from constant fire than stand toe-to-toe with you. This can lessen the damage to your own ship. Secondly, if you are in a less manouverable large ship, they can help you deal with fast-moving small fighters while you concentrate on larger enemies. Thirdly, if you are in a smaller ship that occasionally needs to move out of range, a single long-range turret can be useful to keep your ship technically engaged with a pirate while security forces take a ship down. This can help to avoid missing bounties if you have to disengage and can be useful while you hone your skills. Fourthly, although they cause less damage, they can also create less heat and distributer draw, so they can be useful to balance ship weapon overheating. In some locations (eg. the small hardpoints underneath cobra Mk111s) they tend to fire at different times to fixed or gimballed weapons. Finally, it is quite rewarding to use a combination of fixed weapons and turreted because it allows you to concentrate on aiming just one weapon. This can be quite freeing and effective, even with smaller ships as long as you use high damage fixed weapons. An example might be a Cobra MkIV with three small efficient railguns and two overcharged or long-range turreted pulse lasers, ideally with a couple of effects applied.

The only two reasons I use turreted is to apply corrosive and emmissive effects. Emmissive I put it on the pulse since its instant in comparison to a mc. Also its great for those cold running builds since "fire at will" will always track him regardless of heat in my experience.

As someone with a profound visual impairment that is just getting into playing this game, I really appreciate you mentioning disability because I think a lot of people shy away from talking about options such as turrets for disabled gamers, especially because so many people view them as a cheetah or what have you when options similar to disappear in other titles. Again I just appreciate you bringing light to this and wanted to say thanks!

Fantastic video as always! However I do use Multi-Crew also and my friends. So its now 13 of us! But lemme tell you ... A Type-10 with a full crew is great fun, and yes, I said a Type-10!. What I want to know is can we have a full wing, with full crew compliment (So a full wing but with 12 players in). Because honestly, multi-crew is actually really really fun, it's fantastic for new players, or even super casual players who only have a couple of hours to play. Its great for Stellar photography and video making (really good 3rd person camera). It's also great for people who are overwhelmed by the controls. So its great to get your kids to jump in and be your crew. There is alot of possibilities with the system tbh, and I think it does get overlooked alot. BUT ... I do agree, they are really crap outside their main function of what you described in the video. Low damage output and only really good for applied status effect. Engineering them really helps though.

What does the larger circular reticule signify, that seems to appear when the target is directly in front of the ship (e.g. with multi-cannons at around 1:15)? I think it might be unique to gimballed multicannons.

5:33 I don't quite understand the rationale behind this. Lasers, i.e. instant hit weapons should be fixed, but cannons, with their slow projectiles, should also be fixed?

One build that is very rarely explored is focusing on evasion by means of primary thrusters. For example, one of my favorite builds is a very lightweight Mamba with dirty drives, efficient turreted large beams, and turreted medium autocannons. The firing arcs for the hardpoints on the mamba are almost the entire upper 180 degrees, allowing you to orbit around the enemy keeping out of their firing arc. It requires a lot of situational awareness and VR or some form of headtracking is very much needed to be able to constantly look "up" to keep an eye on your enemy. It's not a fast killer, but it sure is fun to fly! EDIT: For clarity, by orbiting I mean keeping your enemy "above" your ship at all times, whilst you nose follows a trajectory around your enemy at a fixed distance. Unlike a small agile ship like an Eagle where you would mostly strafe away from the enemy's firing arcs, you're taking advantage of that blue zone maneuverability boost, keeping your tangential speed very high. If you've ever played EVE Online, you'll know what I mean

I use huge fixed for the large targets and gimbal in the rest for the small targets, on my corvette. Only on the FDL or similar agile craft i would go full fixed, on the slower ships i am struggling with the aim and loosing too much on target damage.

Did they remove the option, "fire at will" and "target only"? The only option I have is "forward fire".

I have three medium pulse turrets on my Type 9 in case I don't manage to invade an interdiction, because literally any ship except the T9 itself can manage to stay behind me if I don't fly assist-off, which I am not too good at.

I only use turreted weapons in my freighter build as a confusion tactic against hankers so they don't know if I will stay and fight or Run away

How extactly, one could un-traget opponent ship, when there are not other targets around ? Is there a specific keybinding for that ?

Used to use a large beam turret on top of the FAS to good effect. In a turning dogfight against player or NPC, they couldn't hit me but my turret was hitting them. It may not be as efficient but it still has it's place.

if i made turret with scramble spectrum it is worth or not, sir? sorry my bad english but i hope someone reply me for my noob question

First of all, I only play PVE / Solo and enjoy dogfighting with my FDL, but I dream to have a Turret Boat, just manouver and do nothing for the $$$. I plan to do a Anaconda (and some time, in my forever dream, the Cutter) Turret Boat fully modded with pulse Turrets ( because I learnt, that focused Mod is the best). I'm note sure about the Outfitting and experimental effects, but with the planner I can infinite fire with all Wep Pips. Is there an in depth guide for outfitting / modding and exp effects for each slot / mod / exp. effect or maybe a PVE / Combat oriented guide?

Still need to engineer my turrets on my annie’s two class one hardpoints, main reasons for those to be turreted is because 1) hardpoint placement 2) I couldn't think of anything better to put in those hardpoints since a good chunk of the time my ship is obscuring the target unless they fly past it's belly instead of over the ship. Plus they only time the turrets have any real time on target is when I'm lining up the class 4 weapon. Personally I've always seen turrets as a support weapon and rather play with gimbal or fixed Truth be told I'm trying to get my hands on pack hounds to put in those class one hardpoints but that requires me to do power play.... I already have the time pledged.... But power play.... Maybe some day.

On my Anaconda, I use hi-cap corrosive turreted mcs and one short-ranged thermal vent beam laser. The beam laser helps keep the ship cool.

This video is fantastic. The problem is that for a new player is very hard very very hard to process all these informations watching it once and ...maybe this is worth to watch once one has a ship and has to decide to mount this stuff or has played and fought at least 50 100 times.. otherwise at least for me it's very hard to process all these info and keep them with me. I think you made it very clear anyway, the work in this video is OUTSTANDING.

so to get my friend started in the game, i took him out in my anaconda with a fighter bay, that gave him a insanely great start as he learned how to fight in a wet napkin and a 100% disposable ship with big daddy anaconda there to back him up and do the heavy lifting, it was a very very fun multi crew experiance

The best use I've found for a turreted weapon is with builds like my Goid killer Anaconda. I use a turreted beam laser with thermal vent to vent the heat generated by all the gauss cannons. I also use one on my Plasma Vette. But other than a few niche uses turrets are pretty bad.

Turrets need a buff. Id gladly take a hit to my speed or mobility if it means I have 360 degree coverage of a decent weapon. I wanna fly my ship as a mobile gun platform with fighters, turrets, and heavy shields. I'm not interested in dogfights in a space game.

Wish I woulda seen this before I started engineering the turreted beams on my Cobra Mk3 and gimballed on my Krait Mk2. I can see how the higher dps and lower power draw of fixed would be better as you improve your thrusters and are able to track targets more accurately.

I have 2 small turreted pulse lasers in the top of my Corvette, to keep some damage on my target while I'm trying to get them back in front of me

It has been over a year since I last played but back then I was mainly doing bounties/conflict zones. I just really like combat. ;-) Turrets are very energy efficient weapons and I decided to use that property and go for a build that would let me stay in combat for the longest period possible. No reloading, no going back to base for more ammo. Just sheer persistence. I was using a souped up to the max Federal corvette* with everything put into regeneration, both energy and shields. I was using beam turrets in the medium and large slots with efficiency and thermal vent. Two huge gimbal beam lasers with the same ef+tv mods. And two pulse turrets in the small slots with efficient, scramble spectrum and emissive (I was still trying to figure out if emissive was actually doing something useful or not). So yeah, lasers baby! The beauty of all this efficiency plus maxed out weapon regeneration is that you can fire the turrets indefinitely at only a single pip. Yep, I am not kidding. Infinite firing time. Put in four pips and fire the huge beam lasers and I could still sustain nearly a minute worth of deadly laser fire. Occasionally you could get swarmed in a conflict zone as your AI teammates all died and shields started to disappear. When that happens the thermal venting really works wonders. Usually the heat level was near 0%. Even when I popped double shield boosters the temperature never reaches 100%, if you have a target that lasts longer than the regeneration cycle. *I wish my old ED shipyard links still worked though. I would've linked the build here. :-(

What if you’re fighting fast moving ships in a slow turning ship? How could you ever expect to be able to stay on target when they can out turn you?

What if I'm using a slow and sluggish ship, say a Type-10 with an onboard fighter, wouldn't it make sense for the weirdly placed guns to shoot themselves while I assist my main ship with a fighter? Sort of like an aircraft carrier.

Are there certain ships that have such awful turn rates that they need turrets? I don't know as I only purchased nimble ships.

This is an interesting point. But let's say I am using my Type 10, and I have not engineered it, would turret weapons be good?

I use eng pulse turrets on my python with one large gimb mc. Turrets do the job as enemy always run up to avoid my mc. So is always gets under turret fire until my python finish turning and get enemy back in from of me

Personally I run turreted burst lasers on my Anaconda's top and nose mounts while running gimballed multi-cannons on the underbelly mounts. This set up has worked fairly well in conflict zones and haz-rezzes. The lasers constantly tick away at their shields while I line up the cannons for the big damage.

Beam turrets are just too good to ignore. They don't need leading and always hit. Unless target is using chaff that is but it can't be 100% in most cases. To match this output you'd have to be perfectly hitting the target for 30%-50% time of engagement with the gimbal/fixed beams. Maybe it's possible with smaller ships but not with larger ones. As long as they connect, your target's shields are draining so your projectile can deal full damage. Also you only need to worry about aiming one weapon since turrets are shooting fully autonomously.

What would you prefere if you fly the type 10 defender because here you have a slow ship where i think that turrets is a good choice

What about type 10 defender slow turnrates? 😅

I use turrets in conflict zones with engage at will, that will allow me to hit more ships simultaneously and get rewards when the NPCs take them out

This helps explain why my new Type-10 was getting shredded in low intensity combat zones.

another reason to use turrets would be if your build would technically require 3 firebuttons. Then you can set your turrets to "attack at will" to have them fire as soon as they have los on a hostile or "target only" and pair em with another weapon (multicannons are awesome for this as they have a spinuptime; means you can hit the button and get your turrets going while the multicannons dont fire and when you want to fire those you simply press the button and keep it pressed; but there are other combinations that make sense). It goes without saying that the weapons on the turret are there for utility rather than damage (like thermal vent beam lasers or corrosive multicannons, eg.).

So I have a question. My T10 is extremely slow when trying to manuveur around to get my target in front of me. (I'm slowly engineering it to be more responsive, but it's still a T10) For this reason alone, I've elected to go with turreted weapons. However I use it as a platform and hop into a fighter. Would this be a good use of turreted weapons in this case?

What about using turrets with multi-cannons and at least one Emissive Munitions experimental effect?

Thans captain, that was very interesting!

they help cutter since it takes half a lightyear to turn around they just a sidekick till we can regain target with our main weapons

Chaff can be bypassed by keeping crosshairs on aiming point and locking onto and off of enemy repeatedly. This keeps the spread low and allows most shots to hit anyway. Be aware of security ships or allies behind your target as you might accidentally target them instead

I've always used gimballed autocannons as my main with missile backup in freight haulers. Less power hungry and let me divert more power to shield and engine to get away.

nice informative video!

Late to the party but on the anaconda i use the class one for turrets due to its placement, whereas with smaller faster ships I don’t need them and move resort to gimble/ fixed

Your videos are GREAT, thanks for all the knowledge, really helping this noob get up to speed, THANKS!

I tested 2 large turrets on my anaconda, long range thermal vent beams, looks good on paper but in practice no good at all, the turrets are so slow to track, miss all the time.

What about using turrets as a defensive measure, let's say on a Type 9 or an exploration Anaconda with minimal Thrusters? The Type 9 or even Type 10 hardpoints placement almost calls for turrets, so do the small hardpoints of the Anaconda.

That almost a year late but... "Fire at will" mode do not require pulling a trigger. In fact in this mode turrets WONT shoot at all if trigger is pulled. They would automatically fire at any enemy ship that attacks you. Thou , they would not fire at enemy that only try to break your hatch with hatch breaker limpet and do not shoot at your ship. In the same time - SLF in fire at will mode would attack those pesky rats and that would trigger your turrets too. Also, SLF or Turrets would not interfere if your wingmate under attack (purple enemy marker on radar), until there is an order for SLF or enemy hits your ship somehow(and turn red).

I've seen tons of videos of people in tiny ships taking out larger ones by staying out of the firing cone

Only so much weapon distributor to go around, which will limit your overall dps, ultimately it’ll come down to damage per energy. With turrets being similar to fixed in dpe, even if lower damage per slot, when you got the slots, might as well spread that distributor between as many slots as possible with weapon that has higher time on target, than power 2-3 fixed for lower overall dps.

My new turreted pulse lasers with long range and scramble spectrum would like a word with you!

Note on cannons - you should only use fixed cannons for particular setups where you want to hull mash your opponent, capitilising on particular special effects. For module sniping, you should use gimballed with long range mods as this increases their projectile speed. There is simply no point using fixed cannons with no specific goal, because fixed multis are better at that.

I like putting turret on extremely bad weapon positions, like the 2 medium stern mounted hardpoints on the conda. It's almost impossible to get them both to fire at the same time due to not being able to cross over so and since they are on the sides if they are both turreted they provide an almost 360° bubble of fire making weapons there apply status pretty much constantly.

I see your point, but I'm sticking with my turrets :) I'm not a combat pilot, I only engage NPC pirates who decide to pick on me. The turrets can keep firing and do a bit of damage while I'm trying to get back in range of them, then the gimballed weapons can join in the fun.

I use some turrets with thermal venting on the cutter. On the wing placements