The idea of mounting weapons on ships is not new. In the classical era, ships would carry catapults and ballista. Although bowmen would make up a good chunk of a ship’s firepower. Mainly since those weapons were not intended for an anti-ship role, they were more often used against naval forts. By the fifteenth century, ships began experimenting with cannons, and that included experiments with them as an anti-ship weapon.
These weapons were originally mounted broadside in gun ports. Ships would often mount a fair number of them since early cannon were not particularly accurate. These mounts were initially unarmored, but as guns improved it became increasingly necessary for armor on gun ports. This led to the practice of casemate weapon mountings. Casemates were particularly common with ironclads, but were rather quickly replaced with revolving turrets.
On naval ships, armored turrets mounted along the centerline were found to be quite advantageous, especially given the accuracy and range of the guns of that era. It allowed ships to mount fewer heavier guns, and still focus the majority of her firepower on a single target. Turrets are also great for secondary weapons, and anti-air gun mounts. One of the biggest reasons for ships to mount their main guns in turrets on the centerline was actually weight and stability in rough seas. As armor improved bigger and heavier guns were needed, especially given the increasing ranges of naval combat. This was why ships moved away from carrying large numbers of cannon, to a smaller number of larger guns.
While spaceships aren’t identical to naval vessels, many of the lessons learned with naval ships still apply. Weight is still very much a factor for starships, especially those built to land on a planet's surface, but many space-age warships are actually built in orbit and never intended to land on a planet. This largely negates weight as a consideration, but not entirely. As thrust to mass ratios very much still apply, even if it is largely about horsepower for water bound naval ships. Mass distribution relative to propulsion is particularly important so that you don’t end up flying weird. This is where stability comes into play for starships. So while not every problem is identical, and some even change form. There were lessons to be drawn from traditional naval design. While others could be learned from traditional aircraft.
It was due to the nature of the problem, and the similarities with traditional wetwater naval ships. That when a space warship was first proposed as a counter to the recent problems with space piracy that the first thing engineers looked at were the turrets traditionally employed by naval ships. While it made little sense to copy one exactly, they still provided insights into what was needed. A gun turret needs to be able to rotate, allowing a gun to adjust its angle towards a target. It also needs to be able to elevate the gun. Armor is needed to protect the weapon, and any crew that may be inside, although that part is usually not the case with space age turrets. Remote computer systems allow the gun crew to be safely elsewhere. In fact some turrets are controlled entirely by computer. Regardless, the turret would need to be protected from enemy fire. In space a turret has to consider both horizontal and vertical traverse in order to track potential targets. Where a turret is placed is also very important. In naval warfare, turrets were intended to support each other as a major part of a ship’s broadside firepower. In space there is no reason for this consideration not to apply as well. Although there is no reason to restrict that fire to just the broadside.
Early interplanetary combat vessels employed turret-mounted railguns as a major part of their armament. How exactly these turrets were mounted differed from ship to ship. Largely due to different engineers having different ideas on how to mount a turret on a spaceship. At sea, the main guns of a ship would have been focused primarily on a horizontal firing arc, and the turrets were by tradition mounted centerline on the deck. This as discussed earlier provided a few key advantages. However, that setup didn’t make sense for a spaceship. First off, a spaceship has no waterline to consider, this means that she can mount her guns both on the dorsal as is traditional, but on her ventral as well. In other words, she has more space for gun mountings, especially when one considers the reduced weight factor, especially for ships not intended to land.
What this means is that for starships, available volume matters far more than the weight of the weapons. Unlike a seagoing vessel being heavy on one side isn’t as big of a problem for a ship built in the vacuum of space. Although still very much a problem of a different sort. Weight distribution may not mean much for the stability of the ship, but it does greatly affect maneuvering. It is also important to note that it makes little sense to mount all your weapons on the top of a spaceship, as such they are often mounted on not just the dorsal, but also mirrored in their mountings on the ventral. As mentioned earlier another factor to consider is the importance of gun elevation and its role in available fields of fire, which is even more important for the heavy anti-ship guns of a spaceship than a naval vessel, the reason for this is the three-dimensional nature of space combat. Starships do not fight solely on a horizontal plane, but also on a vertical plane.
More to consider is the shape of the ship. Due to the requirements of their intended domains, the two types of craft are shaped very differently. Ships at sea were shaped by the dictates of the oceans, and their weapons were affected by the nature of the waters and the gravity well they were within. Starships don’t have to contend with these factors. As such shaping them like a naval ship makes little sense. The shape of a starship can be quite varied depending on what you are going for. Still there were lessons to be learned from naval turrets, and they offered a basis for how to design a turret for a spaceship, even if the domains of combat were very different. Main gun naval battleship turrets, while designed for large heavy guns, were not suited to the demands of space combat. Some elements of the designs were useful, but most engineers were more interested in the close-in armaments of more modern naval ships. The close-in, or anti-air armaments of naval ships were intended for greater elevations than main guns, and rapid tracking. Scaling the designs up, and reinforcing them to mount heavier guns allowed for a promising early mounting of space age guns.
These early mountings were not perfect, but they evolved from there. The limitations of early designs quickly became apparent to designers as soon as these first ships went into battle, and the engineers quickly learned what worked best. Everything was worked on, from how ammunition was stowed and loaded, to how the turret was protected from weapons fire. Even the shape of the turrets changed as the era moved on. Designers even experimented with different ways to protect the turrets while not in use. Turrets were naturally armored to protect them in battle, but as was often the case they typically had less armor than the main hull of the ship. This was especially true of smaller turrets intended to track agile targets such as missiles or fighters, as the extra mass of armor meant a more robust system would be needed to rotate the turret.
One popular idea for protecting a ship’s more vulnerable turrets was to stow them beneath the armored belt of the hull, when not in use. This had a few advantages, but to really take advantage of this, the turret would require a mechanism to allow for rapid deployment for when they are needed. Several different such mechanisms were experimented with during this age.
The rise of energy weapons during the Colonial Wars led to a revolution in space age turret design. The key to this revolution lies in how energy weapons differ from guns. With guns, the entirety of the gun itself had to be mounted in the turret. Only a handful of components could be offloaded into the hull, namely ammo storage, and the capacitors for the acceleration coils. As all space age guns were either rail or gauss style cannons. Chemical drivers were largely obsolete. With lasers however, the only thing that really needed to be in the turret was the emitter array, while everything else including the laser beam generator could be safely placed inside the hull. As for particle beams, they too could load more components inside the hull than a comparable railgun could. They did need more than a laser namely, the particle accelerator, the emitter assembly and spatial lensing generator. The accelerator is by far the largest of these components, but thanks to modern techniques it’s no larger than the coil mechanisms of a gauss cannon. The emitter also didn’t need to be as large as the bore of a railgun of comparable yield. These factors all contributed to turrets being smaller. Smaller turrets could track faster, due to having less mass when compared to a larger turret. This is particularly useful when aiming at a small agile target such as a fighter or corvette.
It was also during this age that ship engineers experimented with spinal-mounted weapons. This allowed for a much larger weapon than a ship could otherwise carry to be mounted on a starship. While these weapons required the entire ship to face the target, this was found to not be much of a problem when used as a heavy anti-capital ship weapon. Particularly on smaller more agile ships, such as fast attack frigates. Such ships had to be built around the spinal weapons however, but could punch far above their weight class thanks to the large spinal weapon. Some capital ships also featured such weapons. Not all, due to the structural requirements of mounting a weapon in this fashion.
The advent of continuous beam weapons brought about the ability for a new type of weapon mounting. Array mounting. The idea behind array mounting is to use a series of linked beam emitters in armored strips, rather than mounted on a turret. This completely eliminates the mechanical component of adjusting your aim. Instead, as the beam is fired it can move from one linked emitter to another, allowing the beam to be sustained longer than would be possible with other mountings. This also aids with the cooling of these weapons, but the greatest advantage of an array mounting is for beam output. The larger the array is the greater the overall power output of the beam weapons. This gives the beams incredible sustained stopping power. Assuming of course you can meet the power demands of the system. The setup does hinder the tracking of small agile targets, especially at close range, but at range it matters little. The strips are also designed so that the emitters can refocus within a limited arc in order to maintain target lock. Array mounted particle beams have been found to be very effective anti-ship weapons, able to carve ships apart at range with precision accuracy.
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For the Enterprise, her cutting beams, as you may have noted, are mounted in an array mount. Being anti-ship beam weapons, this is the prefered mounting for them. However array mountings do take up a fair amount of internal volume. Not to mention turrets are better for tracking small, fast moving targets. The Enterprise mounts her other energy weapons in a series of pop-up ball turrets that contain particle cannons in a focused-pulse emitter configuration. In this configuration they are designed to fire short, but intense, energy pulses, rather than a sustained beam. Each turret can mount several cannons with this emitter configuration. There are several advantages to mounting multiple cannons in the same turret rather than mounting a single larger cannon in a turret. Multigun turrets allowed a ship to mount more cannons with fewer turrets taking up less space. A single larger more powerful gun is also not necessarily superior to several smaller guns. On the Enterprise her main antiship cannons are mounted in quad turrets, while her dual-purpose medium cannons are mounted in dual turrets.
The choice of mounting those medium guns in dual turrets is largely due to their multipurpose nature. They need the power to be a threat to capital ships, and the tracking for smaller faster targets such as fighters and corvettes. Limiting the number of emitters to two per turret allows for a smaller turret, and as mentioned before, smaller turrets can rotate more easily due to their lower mass. Something that is key for their dual-purposed role, however, it is important to note that they lack the tracking to accurately track missiles.
Also you may have noted a lack of turrets not listed as pop-ups on the Enterprise. This is largely due to the considerations and requirements needed to be met for an interstellar vessel like the Enterprise. The Enterprise relies on her hull armor to protect the ship from hyperlight impacts. Her turrets have armor independent of the main armor on the hull, but that armor is also thinner and therefore weaker than the main hull plating. Therefore they are better protected from hyperlight impacts stowed inside the hull. Her heavier gun turrets may mount fairly thick armor as well, but even with those turrets the protection is notably less than that of the main hull. This is largely due to mass limitation, and the need for these turrets to be able to track targets. As such all of her turrets do benefit from being stowed beneath the main armor during transit. Even better, the mechanisms have been optimized to allow these turrets to be deployed quickly when needed.
As you may have noted, for protection against missiles, and torpedoes the Enterprise relies mainly on her energy web, but she also has a grid of armored emitters placed all over the hull. These emitters aren’t designed to move or track at all, instead they fire a wide area burst of particle flak. The idea is to flood a vector with particle energy, in order to detonate or burn up any warhead that got through the energy web. These flak projectors are very short range, and require a grid of them to properly cover the hull. Since these emitters are configured for wide area flak pulses a simple armored gun port is often sufficient, but they can also be mounted on turrets. A single one can cover a fair chunk of the hull, although some overlap is required for best coverage. As such, these flak projectors are mounted in armored ports every twenty meters. Additional turret mounted projectors are also strategically placed to provide additional redirectable flak coverage where needed.
That brings to mind another item of important note, turret positioning. People have been trying different solutions for gun mounting and positioning since the age of sail. There is a reason for this, since where you put your guns matters. Turrets allow guns to fire in any direction they are pointed at, but your own hull can and often does limit their arc of available fire. Other turrets can also interfere with that arc of fire. As such the game is to place your turrets so that they have the greatest angle of fire with the least interference, while also keeping them in a location that doesn’t cause other undue problems for the ship. One solution for this that appeared in the age of the battleship was superfiring turrets. This placed the turrets on different elevations, so that a turret behind another one could fire over that first turret. On naval ships this meant that the foremost, and rearmost turrets would be close to the deck, while turrets towards the middle of the ship would be raised above them.
Starships are not shaped the same way naval ships are, and fight on a more three dimensional field of battle, but turret position is still very much important. As the more turrets that can fire on a target, the more firepower you bring to bear, and the quicker it can be destroyed. On the Enterprise, her turrets are mounted close to the hull, so that they can be more easily retracted and deployed. As such the shape of the hull itself is more important for maximizing the arc of available fire. That shape is also important for the hull armor, and how it affects overall protection. As such her hull was shaped to maximize protection without compromising her available arcs of fire. Her guns are laid out in a spoked wheel formation that provides a superb arc of available fire, and takes advantage of the hull curvature to put them in naturally superfiring positions. Due to the elongated nature of her saucer’s curvature, the majority of this firepower can be directed forward, port, or starboard, and to a lesser degree dorsal and ventral. With her aft quadrant being rather weak, in overall firepower. This was actually intentional, and has been the norm for human designed ships for decades.
Moving on, we have so far covered guns, and energy weapons, but have yet to cover missiles and torpedoes. Before we really get into how they are mounted, we should take a moment to look into what these are. In space the two are largely similar devices. They are guided projectile weapons with a warhead. That warhead being what provides the majority of their firepower. So what is the difference? Well that lies in their construction. Missiles feature a full propulsion system which is what gives them the majority of their speed and energy. This gives them excellent tracking and range, and longer range versions are often aided by a catapult launch. Torpedoes on the other hand feature only a minimal thruster assembly, and must rely on a catapult to reach speed. Although this does come with a few advantages.
Since a torpedo doesn’t have a full engine and everything that entails it has more space compared to a missile of similar size for its payload. As such torpedoes generally hit harder than their cousins, and since they do have some engines they can still guide themselves to the target. It’s helped even further by the fact that in space, a small nudge can mean a lot. Naturally a small agile target would be able to outmaneuver a torpedo volley, but a larger target such as a cruiser? They might be able to avoid one or two, but certainly not the entire volley.
Moving on this would indicate that missiles tend to lend themselves to tracking faster and more agile targets. You would be right with that, and it shows in the weapon choices of ships like the Enterprise.
Now then, how are these weapons mounted? Well like the guns, designers drew from older wetwater ships for initial designs. Especially for larger ships, while smaller ships drew from aircraft. Anyway, as both groups of design sources would show there are two general ways a missile or torpedo could be mounted. Internal, or external. Aircraft due to their size are an excellent example of this. On an aircraft you may have noted that many designs mount their missiles to external hardpoints often on the underside of the wings. While others have internal bays in which to stow missiles.
On ships, an example of internal mounting is the Vertical launch cell. The entirety of the mechanism is located inside the hull, with only an armored hatch on the deck indicating the presence of the missile system. When fired, the hatch opens allowing the missile to pass out into open air, while the launcher system itself is located entirely within the hull of the ship.
Missiles can also be mounted on turrets which is an excellent example of external mounting for a ship. Naturally, turret mounted missiles are smaller and therefore shorter ranged than their internally mounted counterparts, and therefore lend themselves to different roles.
On the Enterprise we can see examples of both types of general mounting. Her torpedoes are internally mounted, with the warheads being stored in large dedicated torpedo bays. Internal mechanisms transfer torpedoes as needed into a rotating set of magazines, which load into the launcher before being fired. The launcher itself is a powerful catapult that accelerates the projectiles to C-fractional velocities. On the hull, the only evidence of their existence is a small armored launching port. This port even includes an armored hatch to protect the torpedo tubes, and is designed to open just before the torpedoes fire, and quickly drop back into place after they have been fired. This mounting works great for these anti-ship warheads.
It would not work so well, for her photon missiles. Those are short-range warheads intended for fighter defense. Instead of being mounted in fixed mount internal tubes, they are instead mounted in armored turrets. Each armored turret features three tubes, and is designed for volley fire just like the torpedo launchers. They do not however include a catapult, as it was deemed not needed given the shorter engagement ranges of these warheads. The turrets themselves, like her other mountings, are designed to be retracted below the main hull armor when not in use.
They are not ball-shaped like her other turrets however. Ball-turrets are great because they allow for a high incidence of fire, and can be easily armored. Unfortunately the photon missile system doesn’t quite fit that well in a ball-shaped turret. The problem being the magazine loading system employed. As such they are mounted in a more rectangular turret housing that is limited to a lower incidence of fire when compared to a ball turret. Thankfully the guided nature of the projectiles they fire make up for this limitation, as they only need to be pointed in the general direction of the target. The missile itself will take care of the other variables, and there are a fair number of those.
Moving on, ammo handling and firing. Each turret stows her missiles, in a missile bay located below the armored hull. This provides extra protection for the volatile projectile weapons. An automated loader system loads them into a rotating magazine system as needed, with each mag being fed into the turret, as the last one is removed. This allows for a rapid reloading of the turret. Allowing a single turret to deploy more missiles in a shorter window of time. Like the torpedo launcher this process takes approximately six seconds, and allows each tube to fire a volley of five tracking warheads. As such a single turret can fire fifteen warheads in rapid order.
Like her gun ports, the location of her missile turrets is quite important. They are distributed across the hull to provide antifighter coverage, with extra turrets concentrated around vital areas, including the bridge, hangers and main sensor array. Again they need to be placed in positions to support each other, and they very much are. Each is carefully positioned to maximize coverage, so as to ensure that any attacking small craft would be inside the firing arcs of several turrets. Allowing them to overwhelm hostile fighters and bombers.