Chainfire standard faction/basic turrets, or Solaris?
I'd like to have the high damage output of the faction/basic turrets, but with the ability to take on snubs too.
I have 4 Charons fitted on all my Cruisers now. as they have a high DPE with massive DPS, and unlike Mortars, don't miss the target as much, you pretty much need to fire a Mortar at 2K range for it to hit anyway, and even then it will often miss.
That's without taking into account that they use twice as much energy per damage as a Cerb.
Some other things I've noticed...
Pulse Cannons do almost the same DPS (shield) as a Cerb, yeah they're more energy efficient at taking out a shield, but why sacrifice 25% of Hull DPS later on in the fight, especially since most of the ships defense is its Armor/Hull, even more so with a CAU8 BS.
Shock Ray's do a pathetic amount of DPS, they are energy efficient, but why bother when the refire rate is appalling? Maybe they are designed for anti-snub due to the high speed IDK, they'd probably never hit a Bomber that knows what he's doing.
I use either full solaris + cerbs only, or basic turrets with a variety of heavy guns (most often cerbs though).
The Pulse Cannon has double the range of a cerb, they are good if you are a nub at turret steering and sometimes venture out of cerb range of your target, or for stripping the shield at range before getting in close. But as you probably know, capital ship aiming is messed up so pulses and mortars and other low-refire weapons aren't really always a good choice if you are going for PVP (although in groups it is slightly different, you can get into angles and catch the enemy unaware and be able to land some mortar/pulse hits more easily).
Shock Rays are terrible, I cant hit a thing with them or any of the other ray weapons (the transport ones... wtf...).
To answer your question: Unless you know you are going to be involved in a lot of snub combat against small ships / experienced pilots, go for chainfire basics over Solaris as they give you more versatility.
Chainfiring is the term for splitting your weapons into different groups that fire in different steps, effectively increasing your refire while reducing the damage per hit. This is done with the intention that you will hit more often and do more damage overall.
One method is by setting a weapon group to include half of your weapons, firing that, then changing to another weapon group with all of the weapons halfway between shots to double your refire. This can be tweaked to include as many groups as you can manage or different mixes of weapons (usually of the same speed).
inB4 I ninja someone.
Extra: I'd actually tend to recommend the opposite of Mimir's approach (although his is useful for anti-cap stuff if you are using primaries for DPS instead of cerbs), at least when fighting snubs. With the Thanatos (the main cruiser that I fly by far) which has four heavy slots close to each other at the front, particularly CR|-Prometheus[FF123] which has all four as cerbs and full prims on the other slots, if you fire all weapons at a snub its shields can be stripped by the prims and then the hull gets caught by the cerbs. For ships that don't have (as many) cerbs, you can make up for it by simply wearing them down with the more accurate Solaris fire - I had another Thanatos that had the old Razors for when their shields were down but it would be nowhere near as useful against caps.
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