I will find it interesting adapting to these turrets in my python, I have a few mental notes for tomorrow.
I'm going to have to work turret locations into my flight paths so I can check up on them more frequently. Wouldn't want a missile or rail turret to flip close to my redline, especially because blues don't defend them but love to hack them and I won't have the time to stop that now so I will have to babysit them
Attacking a turret is going to be difficult. Even with my two gunner's and my xt-1s it will take all three of us hitting every missile in our clip to destroy one on a pass. With exploding gunner's and the time and speed needed for a strafe like that is close to impossible so high orbits are going to have to be the strategy. That of course has its own problems, gunners could still explode and it is extremely hard to hit anything with missiles in an orbit which means more wasted shots and a longer engagement time. Both I am weary about.
Blaster turrets pose the biggest problem of the three, they can elevate much higher than their rail and missile counterparts. Making high orbits much harder to do with the same drawbacks only more difficult. For these I'm thinking I'll have a speed hacker or gunner jump out and hack them rather than waste time ammo and potentially crew fighting it. Though of course then I'll have yet another turret to babysit. Since it is a general rule of thumb to not trust blueberries with anything I don't want to spend my games babysitting turrets and nothing else so my crew and I will have to destroy some, probably rails then missiles.
The biggest challenge I can see are going to be redline turrets. I really don't want to pull out a tank when I want to dropship just to take put redline turrets. As it stands now I make it put with only a few seconds 6-7 if my gunners and I can all hit, nobody explodes and I guessed correctly where the turret is because it doesn't render until half way through a strafe run. If we are lucky we might be able to take one out in one run, realistically we are looking at two to three runs to destroy one turret, depending on other factors it could take much more or even be unassailable to my dropship.
I would really hate if there was a turret that I couldn't drop troops on, say a contested area, blue berries are pinned by it and I cannot come in for an attack either (be it av or tank or dropship) and would be even more annoying if as soon as we clear a turret and hack it the enemy just hack it right back and start hitting us again.
As for my dropship itself, I will definitely need to up my minimum crew from 2 to 3 preferably a speed hacker but anyone with decent hack skills, a big pair of balls and some jumping skill will do. I can't have my gunner's change to lighter suits or they would explode more frequently, and heavies will be too easy a target on the ground for this kind of mission so it has to be another player. Still the ideal crew remains at 4 and that will never change.
Only problem I see with this one is time management, people don't want to sit in a dropship, they want to go on missions, and if I have a lot of turrets to babysit, av, suicide dropships, incubi and tanks, to watch out for then it will be harder to also provide the much needed fire support for shocktroopers on missions. In essence I am their life line out and if a turret flips or a tank gets the drop on me they may well become stranded, usually behind enemy lines.
There are still more things I need to think over, a lot of this will be learned from experimenting in the field and seeing how things work. Honestly my life would be a lot easier if the damn missile turret manufacturer made it so the operator couldn't explode a missile in his face but what ever, I've faced worse.
Hmmm looking over this, I wonder how infantry are prepping for this.