Granted that i have been far too busy lately and unable to test this but... If it is handled via the method proposed... then how are normal single part turrets supposed to hit anything as they essentially never point to the target?
I'm pretty sure that this affects only multipart turrets, I remember reading something in the code. Also don't mistake this for now always firing along the normal. That is still only activated by the appropriate flag for the turret in ships.tbl.
The problem here was, that the game calculates a firing vector for the turret. And two possible vectors can result. Either the standard one, or the one along the normal if the flag is set.
I'm not exactly sure how the standard one works, I didn't look much at the code, but I think it goes from the firing point to the predicted enemy position.
So this wasn't the issue really.
The issue was that this vector, no matter which one of the two calculations was used, is never used later in the code. Instead a helper vector is used, which always points from the turret base position to target.
So if you want to keep that behavior you can just as well remove the entire calculation code before that because the results are never used anywhere anyway (except the turret location vector, the turret firing vector is totally ignored).
We can do some more testing on this, sure, but I'm very sure that this doesn't have a lot of negative implications. After all from the comments in the code this was the original intention of the developer anyway.
The code has been committed already, so you can just build it and test it with several differnt turrets. From what I could see multipart laser turrets work fine in Saga, so do single-part missile turrets. The rest must be determined I guess.
One thing is for sure.. a non-movable laser turret with "fire along normals" set will never hit a target. But I think that's only logical and fully correct. The flag simply makes no sense for turrets that cannot move. Without the flag they should work just fine. But as I said, we can test it to make sure.
Someone else has to do that though, since I don't have any model in Saga that has a non-movable laser turret, unless I can improvise something by switching a turrets weapon or something.