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Removable Turret Gun

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"Press B to detach turret"
Halo 3

Sometimes you need More Dakka, but the turret is fixed to the ground (or mounted on a vehicle). What do you do? Grab a hold of the gun, steady yourself, and tear the BFG from its mount. Almost always wielded as a Chainsaw-Grip BFG.

In Video Games, there will most likely the drawback that if the turret gun had Bottomless Magazines when mounted, then the gun would lose that once you detach it, as well as slowing you down and being less accurate.

A Sub-Trope of Improbable Use of a Weapon. Contrast with Anchored Attack Stance if the gun has the ability to be fixed on the ground or not at will.

It should be noted however, that many gun emplacements from the Great War/World War Two era (especially plane turrets) were equipped with lightweight machine guns that were designed to be carried around, but not fired when dismounted. Then there are the portees, that aren't technically "turrets" but tend to be mounted like one in lighter vehicles.


Examples:

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    Anime 
  • Mobile Suit Gundam SEED: The twin METEOR units are a cross between this and Mecha Expansion Pack. Normally kept docked to the sides of the space battleship Eternal as turrets, they can detach and dock with a compatible mobile suitnote  like a massively oversized Jet Pack - the suit nestled in the middle of a U shape between two enormous BFGs. In this case the METEORs' function as a support vehicle came first; the Eternal was designed to equip them as turrets because they were too large to fit in its hangar.

    Fan Works 
  • Rocketship Voyager: While Voyager is docked with a Hirogen warship, one of its multi-barreled autocannons (meant for defense when Voyager has landed on a planetary surface) is dismounted from its gun blister and lashed to the deckplates in front of the airlock, in case the Hirogen try to storm the ship.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • During the battle at the Factory in Alita: Battle Angel, Alita yanks a minigun from one of the Centurions she utterly demolished, drags it on the ground and silences the annoying bounty-delivering robot with a burst.
  • In Avatar, Jake makes use of his new body to take a helicopter's mounted M60 while exploring Pandora. It doesn't help.
  • Flash Gordon: Prince Barin kills a couple of mooks who are using a machine gun-like energy weapon on a tripod. He picks the gun off the tripod and kicks the tripod away, then continues on using the weapon like a minigun.
  • During the final battle in Fire Birds Brad Little talks Billie through converting an air-to-air missile from his crashed Apache chopper into a makeshift shoulder-fired missile, with which she downs an enemy fighter jet strafing them.
  • In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, after Nebula crash-lands her ship while chasing Gamora, the latter yanks off a gatling-like turret from the ship and fiddles with its circuitry to make up for the lack of a trigger. The turret is much bigger than she is, but she has the Super-Strength to handle it.
  • The Mummy (1999): Ardeth Bey yanks the mounted Lewis Gun from a crashed biplane before it sinks into the quicksand.

    Literature 
  • Dred Chronicles: Ann Aguirre's novel Perdition has Queen Dred and her guys boosting a couple of these when they raid their prison ship for scavengeable weapons.
  • This was the basic plot of Robert Westall's children's novel, The Machine Gunners. In it, a group of English kids find and salvage a working light machine gun from the rear turret of a Heinkel He 111.
  • Heavy worlder and right man to Sten, Alex Kilgour does this on board a spaceship with a long range flare gun. The corridor walls ensure extra crispy mooks.
  • Men, Martians and Machines: The Marathon has an eight-barreled pom-pom gun that can be detached from its turret and deployed in the airlock for anti-personnel use.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Similar to the Real Life example below, Sgt. John Basilone in The Pacific uses a Browning M1917 heavy machine gun without its tripod to kill several Japanese soldiers during the attack on his squad's position. Averted when he uses the M1919 on Iwo Jima, since the newer gun has a carrying handle allowing for it to be fired from the hip or without a tripod.
  • Teal'c does this in the Stargate SG-1 episode "The Fifth Man" by pulling the gun off of a downed death glider, using it as a squad-support heavy weapon. The BFG returns in "48 Hours" when Teal'c uses it to snipe the cockpit of an al'kesh to kill the Goa'uld Tanith.

    Video Games 
  • The chaingun in Bulletstorm, at least until the battery power runs out.
  • In Clean Asia, the enemies in Korea carry turrets that when dropped can be picked up by the Attractor ship to replace its main method of attacking with a more typical shooting, until it runs out of bullets.
  • Inverted in the Uprising expansion for Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: the Soviets get the Reaper, a mobile Super Prototype (of the Sickle) unit that can become a permanent fixed turret (and the transformation is a One-Hit Kill for any vehicle).
  • In Commandos 3: Destination Berlin, the Green Beret can do this, though it slows him down and leaves him unable to go prone.
  • Crackdown 2: when you reach high Strength levels, you can pull off turrets and fire them manually.
  • Done in Crysis 2 with heavy machine guns.
  • Deus Ex: Human Revolution: if you managed to hack the turrets to shoot at enemies at a computer somewhere else, you can pick them up and move around and kill enemies with it (provided you also have the aug to pick up heavy objects). Also it stays until it gets destroyed.
  • In Fallout 4, an early quest gives you your first minigun when you wrench it from its mount in a crashed Vertibird. However, there's a Strength requirement to do so, which you likely won't meet unless you put on the suit of Power Armour conveniently located right next to the wreckage.
  • In Far Cry Instincts, you can pick up stationary guns once you've acquired Super-Strength.
  • The First Encounter Assault Recon expansion "Perseus Mandate" nods to this, where the TG-2A minigun introduced in the previous expansion is used to replace some of the unusable M134 miniguns mounted on various Blackhawk helicopters; the first one you can get your hands on in this expansion is even ripped from the wreckage of one such chopper.
  • Half-Life 2: MMod changes the Combine emplacement guns so that they can be detached and carried around with the secondary fire button.
  • Halo: From Halo 3 and onward, you can do this with regular turrets, plasma turrets, missile pods, etc. However, they only have unlimited ammo as turrets and a set amount of ammo when being handheld, so knowing when to detach them is a skill. They also tend to hamper movement. It may be worth noting that in 3, the missile pods are only found as turrets once, in the level "The Storm". Usually they are laying around.
  • Several of the machine animals fought in Horizon Zero Dawn have turrets attached to their body. Aloy can break these weapons away and equip them herself, resulting in this trope.
  • Just Cause 2 has stationary Gatling guns Rico can detach and carry around. The gun still has Bottomless Magazines when carried, but Rico's speed is decreased and he can't jump or pick up ammo for lesser weapons.
  • The Gatling Gun turret in Killzone 3 can be detected as standalone weapon, and if one wants to replenish the ammo, all they need to do is to reattach the gun back to the turret.
  • Lost Planet: you can detach the VS weapons from the VSs themselves, but you can also attach and reattach them back as you like.
  • Love of Magic: "Greg" the Orc pulls the GAU-8 out of a downed A-10 Warthog and uses it as a Chainsaw-Grip BFG.
  • In Men of War, any soldier can detach vehicle-mounted machine guns and fire it on foot.
  • Overwatch: Zarya's Particle Cannon was originally a vehicle-mounted weapon that she ripped off herself.
  • The Laptop Gun from Perfect Dark can be used as a sub-machinegun or deployed as a Sentry Gun. Perfect Dark Zero, alongside the returning Laptop Gun, adds on stationary or hovercraft-mounted turret emplacements which can be swapped between the heavy machine gun and rocket launcher.
  • Phantom Forces has the M231, an M16 designed to be mounted in an M2 Bradley. Combine it's 1000+ RPM, lack of iron sights, and the terrible recoil (you have to aim at the floor to compensate, and if fired while aiming through a scope, the recoil is so large that the scope goes off view, giving a nice, black screen due to how scopes work in Phantom Forces) and you have essentially what is referred to by the developers as a "joke weapon".
  • Tachanka in Rainbow Six Siege does this in a meta sort of way. Originally his gadget was a deployable LMG as a manned turret gun. This was what made him such a Low-Tier Letdown because going into an Anchored Attack Stance was practically a death sentence in the game. He received a much-needed rework to make him more viable, and he traded his semi-auto shotgun for the LMG as his primary weapon.
  • In Serious Sam 3: BFE, there are minigun turrets in some of the earlier levels which shoot everything in sight, including you. In a later level, there's one on the ground facing a hallway that, once it's helped you kill the waves of enemies that come at you from down that hallway, you can pick up.
  • Transformers: War for Cybertron not only has these, but also features an Achievement/Trophy for killing 10 enemies with one.
  • Warframe: In Veilbreaker, Kahl mans a Grattler mounted on a Grineer Dropship to fight off Sentient enemies that he and his brothers are escaping from. The ship crashes but he is able to salvage the Grattler to use on foot.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Justified in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine: the Heavy Bolter is usually mounted on a vehicle or embedded in earthworks to be used by the Imperial Guardsmen, who are just ordinary human soldiers. The player character, however, is a genetically engineered Super-Soldier who is also wearing Power Armour, and can choose to tear it loose and walk around (albeit slowly) while mowing down everything in his path (and the Imperial Guard heavy bolters that are crew-served weapons are generally smaller than Astartes-issue heavy bolters carried by a single Marine).
    • In the 40K Real-Time Strategy game Dawn of War, Imperial Guard artillery teams can fire a basic lasgun while mobile, but have to dig in to get the full potential out of their heavy bolter, or to use specialist weapons (autocannon or lascannon) at all.
  • Wolfenstein: The New Order does this with laser turrets. The usual use of giving them infinite ammo while mounted and then limited ammo while detached (which gets completely replenished just by reattaching then detaching it again) is justified in that they're energy weapons mounted to a power supply.

    Real Life 
  • Sgt. Mel J. Grevich of the 5th Marine Division in the Pacific during WW2 took 6 AN/M2 .30 caliber machine guns from aircraft and modified them for infantry use, which earned the unofficial designation of "The Stinger". Using the version from aircraft meant that rather than have a rather pedestrian rate of fire of around 500 rpm that the infantry version had, the gunner could now take advantage of the cripplingly high rate of fire of 1200 rpm. These weapons were most notably used by MOH recipient Tony Stein. These weapons had the stock of an M1 Garand, the sights and bipod off a BAR, a box welded to the side to hold ammunition, and a trigger manufactured in-theatre. Using this weapon he was the first man from his unit onto the beach of Iwo Jima, and when his unit became bogged down by MG and mortar fire he single handedly charged the enemy pillboxes, mowing down 20 enemies before he (inevitably with this weapon) ran out of ammo. He then ran back to the beach (barefooted and without a helmet for extra speed) to get more ammo. Eight times. Carrying wounded men on his back.
    • As Cracked.com described Tony Stein's weapon: "It's like every gun in the world had sex with every other gun in the world, and then neglected the resulting love-child until it became psychotic and vowed revenge on everything."
  • In a moment more appropriate to the trope, Mitchell Page and John Basilone were holding the line at Guadalcanal with a tripod-mounted M1917 machine gun, a water-cooled beast that weighs 47 pounds not including the ammunition or the water in the jacket and fires powerful .30-06 rounds (mostly used today for killing deer). At one point, Basilone removed the gun from its tripod and fired it from the hip, and R. Lee Ermey demonstrated it on Lock n' Load to prove to naysayers that it was possible, at least if you're R. Lee Ermey.
  • Many vehicle-mounted machine guns, such as used in the turrets of lighter armored vehicles such as MRAPs or Humvees, are designed fit this trope for the simple and expedient reason that it makes the weapon easier to secure if you routinely have to leave the vehicle outside. The gunner simply removes the machine gun and carries it with him to use with a bipod when he goes on foot.
  • The M231 Firing Port Weapon is a short, open bolt version of the M16 that was meant to be used from the firing ports of the M2 Bradley, but was able to be quickly unscrewed from the vehicle in cases of emergencies. Key word: emergencies–the carbine itself was not really designed for infantry use. The M231 had a very high rate of fire and a lot of recoil, and the barrel collar in front of the handguard would quickly become scalding hot after firing since it was directly attached to the barrel. Additionally, the carbine used to be issued with a wire stock, but it was removed for a plethora of reasons, one being to discourage soldiers from using it as a handheld weapon.
  • During the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine, resourceful Ukrainian soldiers have salvaged several coaxial PKT and DShK machine guns from immobolized Russian vehicles. These guns are sent to armorers and local mechanics, who then outfit them with working triggers, pistol grips, and stocks, giving them new life as infantry weapons.

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