Why manned turrets?

[mike wightman]

I tend to err on the side of caution and make the crew as big as I think the rules require it to be - I'm less likely to get a broken design that way.

Reverse engineering of official designs or using the laughable example in TCS does not exactly help

 

[McPerth]

I guess the problem is that HG rules are for large combat ships, where each section would need a command chain by itself, while Bk2 are for small ships, but middle to large sized (5+ kdton) merchant ships do not fully adapt to neither of them.

You cannot design a 20 kdton merchant with Bk2 rules, and if designing it with HG rules you'll need 10 command staff and a full complement of officers at each section, even if it only carries 2 turrets for anti-piracy defense (i don't envision those large merchants, mostly thought for regular trade, to be armed to the teeth).