You just loaded into a new game as weapons. Hit tab, choose talents. Buy all of Turret Cooling Optimizations. Split anything left over between Pistoleer and Health Boost.

Weapons always has a special office, corner, or cubby hole on each ship. Find yours. They're typically labelled.

Once in the weapon room, notice that there are Small Turrets (usually two) and one Main Turret. The Main Turret's control panel is physically taller and wider.
The Small Turrets will fire automatically without your assistance. The Main Turret _requires_ you to be on it. This is where you will spend most of the game.

Get on that turret and shoot what the captain designates. You are now a bare minimum competent Weapons Specialist.

Let's learn to shoot better. Hop on the Main Turret.

HOLD the left mouse button and the turret begins to charge. Alignment circles will move together during this time. RELEASE the left mouse button when the circles perfectly overlap.


Take some practice shots. Over time, this will become muscle memory and alignment will be effortless.

HOLD shift to zoom in.

TAP Q to fire a small pulse laser ideal for intercepting incoming missiles, or clearing explosive mines. This has no recoil. Your normal shots do.

HOLD right click to being locking a missile. Hold it down until lock strength reaches 100%, when the missile will actually fire. Ask engineer for the Missile Lock System to be turned on to speed this up, but understand that this costs power.

Let's go really in depth about your missile systems.

Pressing the number keys while on your main turret is how you fine tune your missiles.
1 - 2 - 3 will load in specific missiles from your silos. Your captain may have equipped up to three separate missile silos and you choose which to fire. Some common choices:

• Tracker Missiles - Very fast, nimble. The only missile that will reliably intercept small pirate craft that are actively dodging.
  
• WD Specials - Bulky, high damage. Cripple the enemy's engines before you use these, or they'll just dodge them.
  
• Shield Piercers - Common loadout on freshly spawned ships. Shield piercers are great at killing shields, but the vast majority of enemy ships are built with armor meta. Fairly useless right now.

5 - 6 - 7 - 8 will target enemy ship systems. This is ONLY for your missiles. Generally you hit engines to slow the enemy craft down to make followup shots easy, then hit Weapons to stop them hitting back. Your captain may have specific strategies. Follow his lead.

Your main turret CAN be used to target enemy subsystems too. Science must use Sensor Focus to achieve this.

This is your Weapon Hub

The big red bar shows system damage. Weapons will take damage randomly every time your ship receives hull damage. Use your repair gun to fix it. Damaged weapons charge and cool slowly.

The bars below display individual power routing. In the early game when power is scarce, consider throttling down your secondary turrets. The Main Turret is always your most efficient damage dealer, often doubly so or more. If the engineer is cutting power to your station due to a heat crisis, you can force what little power you are getting into the Main Turret to maximize damage output.

There's never any reason to throttle down the Main Turret. It is your strongest, most efficient damage dealer, and it draws no power when not in use.

Pulsar is a game about communication. Weak ships that use teamwork can clear all content. Strong ships where communication is breaking down will fail.

Here are some dialogues that you should be having.
"Pilot, what is our attack strategy? Stay back and snipe? Dogfight and stay in their blindspot?"
"Science, what's our sensor focus set to? I'll set the missiles to the same system to knock it out faster."
"Engineer, I'm seeing slow heat dissipation on the main gun. Is Weapons power setting throttled? Can we run coolant just long enough to squeeze off a few shots and finish this fight?"

Your captain may step in on any of those conversations, or delegate and let you solve them yourselves. Ultimately your job is to carry out his plan.

Science in 30 Seconds
Pilot in 30 Seconds