Starfield Watchtower Mod Suggestion

[Mournblood]

Preface: To my knowledge, this mod suggestion hasn't been done, so it should be fertile ground for a competent author who wants to do something new that hasn't been done yet.

Premise: Vanilla outpost watchtowers in Starfield are cool but useless. They do not assist with outpost defense even though that is their implied purpose. Adding turret emplacements (or turret stands) to a watchtower would not only make them an extremely useful addition to outpost defense, it would also solve numerous issues with turret placement and security robot pathing*.

(*Security robots patrol between turret locations but given that turrets can't be placed on such things as storage containers, most players place turrets on their habs which inevitably leads to security robot congestion inside airlocks and habs.)

Idea Details:

• Add either turret emplacements directly on the watchtower, or add turret stands to the watchtower that allows players to place turrets of their choice. Or do both versions so that players can pick from the watchtower version that best fits their needs and playstyle.
• There should be at least 4 turret emplacements/stands (one on each side) on each watchtower, but there is room for up to 8 (two on each side). Turret stands would be on the sides of the watchtower, whereas turret emplacements could be placed on the underside of the observation deck.
• The turret emplacements (which are already integrated on the watchtower) should NOT count against the default 6 turret limit so as to not force players to download/install another mod to increase outpost turret limits. Turret stands (which would allow players to place their own turrets) would potentially require an outpost limit increase mod.
• If you add a power requirement to the watchtower with turret emplacements, it should be reasonably small. I would not recommend basing that on the default power requirements for turrets (e.g. mk. 3 @ 8 power each X 4 turrets = 32 power per watchtower) simply because it would quickly become impractical to place more than a few watchtowers.
• If you're doing turret emplacements, they should be the best available, which are mark IIIs. I will mention that even mark IIIs scale poorly against higher level enemies in level 50+ solar systems. It would therefore be a bonus if the watchtower turrets were a bit better than vanilla mark IIIs. I'd also suggest increasing the detection/engagement range for the watchtower turrets.

 

That's it. Fairly straightforward, and I'm betting there would be high demand for this since outpost defense seems to be a largely neglected area for Starfield modding. I hope someone takes this on, and I'd ask if you do, please port it to consoles (I'm on XBox). Thanks for your time and attention.

Edited October 26 by Mournblood