are laser turrets worth it?

[frumius]

I just had a UFO, maybe a harvester, fly around and around my base while being hit by laser fire continually. It must have been hit over a dozen times with no damage at all. I have seen damage to scouts and fighters so I guess this must have been a harvester. My Stiletto can shoot down any scout or fighter but not a harvester so what good is the laser turret? I checked the search feature here but found nothing about this.

[anonymissimus]

It helps to increase the alien interest into the base where it is firing from, making aliens more likely to choose this base if they decide to attack some base. Thereby it indirectly protects radar-only bases. This could be done with a base rocket launcher as well though, but since I usually have that one built externally I have an internal laser.
It doesn't do much damage per shot it seems, but it does some damage. Fire rate and precision are much higher than the rockets'. You can see the UFO's hitpoints bar only once you have that type researched.

[frumius]

Ok, I see. I thought that since there was no hitpoints bar there was no damage. Still I don't see any real value to the installation and you can only spare room for 1 or 2.

[TallTroll]

>> Still I don't see any real value to the installation and you can only spare room for 1 or 2.

1) Combine base facilities with surface AA sites to create a deathtrap for small - medium UFO types. They can also be used to support your fighters, and up the avg DPS enough to allow earlier tech fighters to take out later / larger UFOs while you're busy researching / building late game fighter techs

2) Eventually, the plan is to rework base building to allow more "spare" slots, so you could make the base defence facilities more useful