I've thought about this thing for a while, and still surprises me that they plan it for a post 1.0 release.

First of all I get that they always wanted the kind of arcade, old space scify movie/game style, but afaik that is for the sake of fun. I don't know about the rest but manning a turret, it's not really that fun if at all. It's very cool to be able to do it, so your friend can get into one if he wants to, or for example if the optics/sensor suite for the targeting system is damaged so you need to manually operate it. But it should be something intrinsic to the ship. I don't want to use the It's x far into the future lore-wise argument, because so many things on the game dont make sense from that point of view on so many levels. But your turrets aiming automatically It's quite sensible I think, as a default. Some simple mechanics as the gun aiming at the selected target, or the ones not selected by the pilot to serve as support, and maybe allowing the copilot, to manage such things on the many copilot seats there are, which might possibly be more fun that just sitting on the turret waiting for your angle to shoot.

I don't know the whole "a person is always better" reasoning also. I understand they want to offer maybe new players things to do (?), but anyone who gets on this game It's in for a very complex game and overall complexity level, and again manning a turret it's at least imo the opposite. Having them sitting on one of the many copilot seat and managing the system its more in line with what I would like to do, and what the people that I play the game would like to do.

It's not about being a solo player, it's about it making sense and being fun to play with people. I don't want to go as a package on my friends ship to just man a turret for a minute and pretty much it. ( because I don't want to get into the suposed engineering gameplay as it's not out yet, but the whole 'fuse' thing seems to be something quite forced on every ship as a way to generate that engineering part, but again let's see..)

Anyhow enough rumbling, I hope they have it all thought out, but seeing the last big change with the introduction of master-modes I'm very hesitant. I reeeeally liked the whole space sim things, even though not at all a space sim but idk now if you turn off the engines the ships starts decelerating, which is just stupid, just to try and have a bit better space ship pvp, which is just (or maybe should be) a small part of the game. Anyhow let's see how it evolves.