How To Stack Turrets on Top of Turrets

This guide describes both known methods of stacking turrets, their advantages and disadvantages, and how to build them.

What Are the Two Methods of Turret Stacking?

Either with light blocks or with docking stations. Here's an overview of both:

Stacking With Light Blocks

Advantage: You can stack as many turrets as you want with this method.
Disadvantage: This will be more expensive, in all cases, by at least a few hundred materials, there's no way around that. While light blocks cannot be directly hit by projectiles, they are weak to nearby explosions, this means you should avoid large gaps between the mothership and the turret, gaps which are not a safety issue when using docking stations.
Noteworthy: Turrets stacked with this method will rotate independently of each other. This will look less realistic, but will also make it easier for the turrets to engage separate targets. As the turrets stacked on top receive no penalty to rotating in opposing directions, this set up would be ideal if you were trying to build similarly fast turrets on top of each other, while engaging separate targets.

Stacking With A Docking Station

Advantage: Docking stations cost 200 materials, light blocks cost 100 materials each, to stack turrets you'll need a bare minimum of 4-5 light blocks; as mentioned previously, this method is less expensive, it's not an immense difference, but it's worth considering. The difference in expense is most relevant when you have a tall base turret which would require many light blocks to place a pole all the way through.
Disadvantage: You can only stack two "levels" of turrets with this method, because you can't place a docking station on a docked object. Consider the picture below, every red block/surface could have a turret block placed on top of it. I have combined both methods of stacking turrets in this picture:

With this method of stacking, you have a base ship, a turret block on that ship which has a docking station, docked to that station is the vehicle with the origin block (here would be the actual part that fires, the firing piece and ammo etc.) and you may have several turret blocks/guns on top of it of that origin block vehicle, but you can't stack turret blocks on top of the turret blocks that are placed on the docked vehicle, and you can't have docking stations either on the docked vehicle or on the turrets on the docked vehicle. The docked vehicle is not allowed to have its own docking stations, you can not use this method to achieve 3 levels of stacking. You could actually use light blocks to get around the fact that you can't place more docking stations to stack more turrets (as seen in the above picture), you could use a docked vehicle, and then use light blocks to stack multiple levels on top of that docked turret.
Also of great importance is the fact that, unlike light blocks, the floating subvehicle absorbs recoil somewhat independently of your mothership, this means if you have a small subvehicle turret and its center of mass is not close to the firing piece the recoil will cause your subvehicle to knock itself out of line with the target from its own recoil.
Noteworthy: The rotation of the docking station which is holding up the base turret will affect the rotation of the turret(s) stacked on top of it, this means if your base turret (green in the above picture) which has the origin block and is connected to the docking station isn't slower than the turret placed on top of it, that turret on top might have difficulty engaging separate targets from the base turret (imagine trying to spin around the machine gun on top of a tank if the actual turret you're spinning around on top of was rotating just as fast in the opposite direction.) This set up is ideal if you want to have a large and slow base vehicle/turret (like the bodies of the mechs on Twin Guard ships) which has various smaller/faster turrets placed on the sides/top of it. This is the closest thing you can have to true turret stacking, the first method is basically just "a magic pole of light blocks is holding one turret on top of another". I can't emphasize this enough: this method is best used when you have a significantly slower (heavier) base turret, or if your other turrets are rotating on a different axis (e.g. you have 1 turret, a docking station on top of that turret, which has a classic naval battleship gun in its tractor beam, and you stick two turrets on the sides of that battleship gun, these two guns use their turret axis to rotate up and down and gun elevation to change its azimuth or side to side position.) I will repeat this one final time: you should only use this method if your base turret is going to be significantly slower (heavier, more blocks) than the turrets placed on top of it.

How to Stack Turrets with Light Blocks

Method A: This is one way to stack multiple turrets that rotate independently of each other with light blocks. This is less efficient than method B, but I've included it so as to address this topic completely.

As you can see on the right, the "gun" (represented by an L shape) that would be closest to the ground (red) has the turret block furthest from the ground, and the "gun" furthest from the ground (yellow) has the turret block closest to it. This is because by keeping the red turret/gun right next to each other you can save some light blocks. Light blocks can pass through blocks, so let's say you got to this point (pictured below):

What you would do is press B on the green turret, build light blocks on top of it, all the way above the red "gun", then you'd place the green gun (ideally, without a gap, the one you see was left for the sake of demonstration.)

Method B: This is a method I have not seen previously, this does not mean it is the first instance of this method, but I did come up with it independently.

In this example, the bottom metal block represents the connection to the main ship, place a light block on top of that, place a turret on top of that, now to continue stacking deselect the turret (press "[", or press B to exit build mode and press B while facing the base block) then you simply build the light blocks around the turret you placed, go as far above that initial turret as you want, place another turret block, and if you need to stack more just continue this process. If you're stacking 3 or 4 turrets, I'm confident that this building method would use less light blocks than method A, because you don't have to repeatedly overlap the same light blocks. Instead of offsetting the light blocks to the front, you could also loop around the side or back. The other potential advantage of building with light blocks in this way is that it will probably be less confusing for beginners.

How to Stack Turrets with a Docking Station

Below is the Twin Guard's "Cleric" with its right side removed, notice that (from your perspective) the docking station is placed to the left of the one-axis turret block at the bottom of the picture.

Below you can see the position of the Mech's origin block.

This is the result of manipulating the docking station's settings.




After you've decided where you want your turrets stacked, place a turret block, place the docking station on that turret block, then you'll need to build a new vehicle near the docking station, place an origin block on this new vehicle, add a couple blocks to it, save that vehicle and give it a name (necessary for next steps), press Q on the docking station, select the name of the object you just saved, then turn the docking station on (see: "On Off Switch"), the origin block should then hover over the docking station, reduce the "hold distance" to make it hover closer. Now you can build on the origin block. When you do, it will probably put your view in a weird direction (you might be building upside down, for example, with the ground "above" your view) the easy solution to this is to add a few blocks in the direction the "origin block vehicle" is facing and one on the bottom (relative to the viewpoint you have when you're building on the origin block vehicle) then go to your docking station and manipulate the elevation/azimuth until the origin block has the correct orientation (those blocks you added on the front/bottom allow you to judge whether or not it's correctly oriented.) You can proceed to build your base turret (green in the above pic) and the, ideally, smaller and faster turret above it (blue).

Important note: If your center of mass is not very close to the firing piece of your subvehicle's cannon, large amounts of recoil can cause your cannon to tilt backwards, this difficulty is less of an issue with larger subvehicles, as they can better absorb the recoil.

My references for this guide were ireLAN's video on turret stacking (for light blocks, he uses method A) and the Twin Guard ships that are built into the game for docking stations.

[Sonic]

Or you can install this which still works. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=935984915

[NuclearFilms]

Nevermind, my idea is not working out for me, maybe its just how i am doing it.

[Brahms]

Okay I guess?

[NuclearFilms]

Nice guide!
I think i have another way to stack turrets with docking stations.
Is it ok if i friend you to discuss the details?

[Brontoscorpio]

@Marion dunno if you solved your problem but if you put a missile controller + LWC onto the same turret as the docking station it will rotate and aim at targets, I use this method to put rotating fire control directors on my ships that pivot with the main turrets.

[Brahms]

Huh, well I think you might be able to get away with placing a firing piece and a bunch of gauge increasers...

[Marion]

That other gun would then need the same caliber and shell though.

[Brahms]

Couldn't you put a Local Weapons Controller and a firing piece (but no actual other parts) on the base turret to make it think it has a gun??

[Marion]

Not that advanced, it's just that when there's a gun on a turret, the turret will seem to traverse to lead for that gun. But if the gun is on a separate subvehicle, then the turret technically has no gun on it and thus won't do any leading and instead point straight at the target. Is there a way around that?

[Brahms]

I've posted your question to From the Depth's official LUA scripting board, I hope someone can figure it out.
http://www.fromthedepthsgame.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=24470