Hi !
A simple suggestion here. Turrets are actualy automatic in detection and firing. I was thinking, what if there were turrets needing a gunner to work properly ? With no need for power and perhaps high dps output but requiring a colonist to press the trigger and to risk its life ?
(http://x4.fjcdn.com/thumbnails/comments/Would+feel+way+more+comfortable+buying+meat+this+way+_34d27151d1a63a3a8105cb13cc288c40.jpg)
On the serious note,
Yeah this would really be a nice feature to have, especially for the modding community.
The "Normal" turrets should be only avaible after some research, but you should be able to build "Manned" turrets from the start, I mean: The turrets right now seem to have some kind of Friend-Foe sensor and such stuff is pretty difficult to do if you just crash landed on an planet (I could understand a turret with "shoot everything that moves" but even that is rather complex).
Or....
Let the turrets be controlled by a colonist on a computer.
Here have this link:
http://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=2881.msg27054#msg27054 (http://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=2881.msg27054#msg27054)
I think that the advantage should be the emplacement uses the colonists accuracy. So a marine operating a turret would be massively more accurate than the auto-turrets are. Inversely, an engineer or noble operating a turret will just spray bullets randomly (and quite spectacularly) into the sky and might even manage to get their fingers caught in the loading mechanism. Them nobles...