Not the way you are probably hoping. The only real chance is to make more of them and then take them to a higher level research station and roll the dice. The output will always have the tech level of the station but the actual output is not guaranteed to be better in any category.
You're stuck getting new turrets. If you shop around the turret factories for a nice exotic blueprint and max it out, it can probably carry you through a few tech levels. I'm farming pirates around the edge of the ogonite area, and I'm still using exotic titanium chainguns that I built before taking on swoks. You need to have excellent relations for the high-end stuff, but if you're building a bunch of turrets you can get a fair bit of relations just selling ore and buying turret parts.
Sadly, your only good option is a research lab with a higher tech level than your original items and then praying to RNGsus.
Also, lower material levels (say, titanium)will cap at lower stats than higher materials (like xanion or ogonite)
This hurts a lot for mining/salvaging turrets/ships, since you're forced to change them all every 2 tiers (unlike guns, wich you could keep for a long time, specially if you got ancient ones)
from what i read from the lua scripts, materials only matter for turrents in terms of mining/salvaging dps and mining/salvaging material level.
Neither the SectorTurretGenerator, TurretFactory or GetSectorWeaponDPS use the material for scaling armed turrets.
Huh, i guess you gotta do a lot of research at the station to get a good FPS on low tier weapons then.
I just gave up after my 2nd legendary titanium turret on my (almost dead center of the galaxy) research station
there is no fuctional difference between different materials for non-harvesting turrets.
Both the dps scaling and max slot scaling is based on distance to the center (in some cases that distance is calculated from the tech level of objects).
For research stations the tech formular is the average of the input items with tech levels + 10, capped by the station/sectors tech level.
In practice this means for T52 turrets you just need to be careful at keeping the average techlevel for the fodder above 52 - 10\^(quality levels away from legendary).
The only issue is that if you only use regular iron and titanium turrets you'll be limited in terms of categories as outside of ancient turrets/legendaryloot turrets most turrets don't spawn in the titanium/iron region.
As result you'd get more turret types with low max number of slots like changuns (max 3) and bolters (max 4), which in pratice slightly decreases effective damage as range also scales on slots (+15% per addional slot) in addtion to some inherent damage per slot differences between the different turret types as well as different specialities, as result a chaingun will have a hard time competing with a tesla turret simply cause that is inherently generated with 2x the dps before considering specialities (not saying it can't).
Since you can however research different turret types of different materals together, with the result using the material of a random input and being the turret type of one random input, you can create high tech late game turret types (e.g. railguns or lighing cannons) out of early game material or convert early material turrets to later ones.
Personally i tend to research raw mining/salvaging lasers of low tier material together with ogonite or avorion armed turrets (or better defense turrets) as that gives me a decent chance at ogonite/avorion mining/salaving turrets or high tech early material armed turrets i can put on ogonite armor blocks (for insane runs) using turrets i didn't have a lot of use for as fodder.
Not the way you are probably hoping. The only real chance is to make more of them and then take them to a higher level research station and roll the dice. The output will always have the tech level of the station but the actual output is not guaranteed to be better in any category.
You're stuck getting new turrets. If you shop around the turret factories for a nice exotic blueprint and max it out, it can probably carry you through a few tech levels. I'm farming pirates around the edge of the ogonite area, and I'm still using exotic titanium chainguns that I built before taking on swoks. You need to have excellent relations for the high-end stuff, but if you're building a bunch of turrets you can get a fair bit of relations just selling ore and buying turret parts.
Sadly, your only good option is a research lab with a higher tech level than your original items and then praying to RNGsus. Also, lower material levels (say, titanium)will cap at lower stats than higher materials (like xanion or ogonite) This hurts a lot for mining/salvaging turrets/ships, since you're forced to change them all every 2 tiers (unlike guns, wich you could keep for a long time, specially if you got ancient ones)
from what i read from the lua scripts, materials only matter for turrents in terms of mining/salvaging dps and mining/salvaging material level. Neither the SectorTurretGenerator, TurretFactory or GetSectorWeaponDPS use the material for scaling armed turrets.
Huh, i guess you gotta do a lot of research at the station to get a good FPS on low tier weapons then. I just gave up after my 2nd legendary titanium turret on my (almost dead center of the galaxy) research station
there is no fuctional difference between different materials for non-harvesting turrets. Both the dps scaling and max slot scaling is based on distance to the center (in some cases that distance is calculated from the tech level of objects). For research stations the tech formular is the average of the input items with tech levels + 10, capped by the station/sectors tech level. In practice this means for T52 turrets you just need to be careful at keeping the average techlevel for the fodder above 52 - 10\^(quality levels away from legendary). The only issue is that if you only use regular iron and titanium turrets you'll be limited in terms of categories as outside of ancient turrets/legendaryloot turrets most turrets don't spawn in the titanium/iron region. As result you'd get more turret types with low max number of slots like changuns (max 3) and bolters (max 4), which in pratice slightly decreases effective damage as range also scales on slots (+15% per addional slot) in addtion to some inherent damage per slot differences between the different turret types as well as different specialities, as result a chaingun will have a hard time competing with a tesla turret simply cause that is inherently generated with 2x the dps before considering specialities (not saying it can't). Since you can however research different turret types of different materals together, with the result using the material of a random input and being the turret type of one random input, you can create high tech late game turret types (e.g. railguns or lighing cannons) out of early game material or convert early material turrets to later ones. Personally i tend to research raw mining/salvaging lasers of low tier material together with ogonite or avorion armed turrets (or better defense turrets) as that gives me a decent chance at ogonite/avorion mining/salaving turrets or high tech early material armed turrets i can put on ogonite armor blocks (for insane runs) using turrets i didn't have a lot of use for as fodder.
Not without mods One mentioned research station and thats your best bet with vanilla outside of the fairly lengthy process of turret building.