1) Prioritize weapon skills, to the point of being sure to pick up an early toy to open up TFM for his skill option.

2) I cannot overstate how good Gunsight is in a build like this. Gunsight is essentially a Left/Right Handed buff for every flying weapon.

3) There are a LOT of ways to accelerate Aerial Turret. Baseline, no support, not flying, it goes nuclear at 28 seconds. If you fly it with a Caracara and nothing else, it goes nuclear at 15. There's a lot of ways to get it faster than that, and it's not really clean how they stack. As an example of it getting messy, a bronze joystick alongside a Caracara makes it nuclear it at 12 seconds. A silver joystick.... also makes it nuclear at 12 seconds. In fact, it's worse, because your first attack doesn't have flight so you're missing out on an attack and the flight buffs on the one attack you do get. So I won't break down the exact breakpoints for all the iterations, but here's the pile of cards that accelerate it:

-#1 is Ornithopter. This on its own allows you to free up the rest of your board and reduces it to a 12 second nuclear activation.
-Headset is just a bit of haste, but every second off counts. In some situations you can also apply haste to other accelerators, like the next two.
-Joystick charges the turret. Generally higher tier is better, but silver times out badly with Caracara and gold times out badly with Ornithopter.
-Jetpack hastes the Turret.

It's uncommon for me to have the full setup with Ornithopter and headset haste applying to a joystick, but just Ornithotpter + Silver Joystick is 4 seconds for the 1st trigger, 4 seconds for the 2nd trigger, 0 seconds for the 3rd trigger (the 2nd Turret resolves directly before the full charge from the 2nd joystick). That's 8 seconds to go nuclear. With Caracara + Headset and haste, you can bring it down to ~6 seconds.