Well, it would be better to say I had it working. I made a model with one turret, made heirarchy with helpers, converted it and ran the game. In the game I ended up getting a ship with a giant turret and a firing point that was fifty meters away from the turret itself, and pointed in the wrong direction.
I went back into max, reset the xform, rotated my helpers, brought it back into the game, and it stopped working. Completely. If I open up my model in modelview, the turret and all it's information is there. It just doesn't appear in the game. And PCS2 crashes the moment I click on the turret.
So this is the heirarchy I'm pretty sure I had when I got it to work. The objects "detail0" and "turret00" are geometry, the rest are helpers.
detail0
|
--> turret00
|
-->helper00
|
--->firepoints00
| |
| -->firepoint00
|
--->properties00
|
-->$fov=180
|
-->$name=laser_turret
|
-->$special=subsystem
n.b. It didn't work until I had made the properties helper. I'm not sure if you can enter them into the turrets user defined attributes or not.