Bigger Turrets or More Turrets

[Borealis4x (OP)]

For the purposes of point defense does it make sense to have many gauss turrets or turrets with multiple guns (twin/tri/quad linked)?

[83athom]

Turrets with multiple weapons are more efficient space-wise.

[Rich.h]

For point defence more is always better than big, simply due to the number of chances to hit you will get. In general any missiles only need a single point of damage to take them out so 4 shots of 1 dmg are going to have a better chance to remove a missile than 1 shot at 4 dmg. In addition if you end up using them against fighters or FAC then you will get a much better sandpaper effect with the added hits gained and so likely get through any possible armour faster than with big turrets.

Finally having a smaller turret means you can push up the tracking speed to squeeze even better chances to hit than you could of done with a big turret and still fit them on your vessels.

[Sheb]

I'm pretty certain a quad turret can target 4 missiles in a salvo.

[Iranon]

Turret gear scales less than linearly with barrel size, so quad turrets are more compact and cheaper than twice the number of twin turrets.
One turret can shoot down multiple missiles in a salvo, but against numerous small salvos number of fire controls may be the limiting factor - bigger turrets than required to destroy one salvo give no benefit because you can't split them between fire controls.

Also, sophisticated Gauss turrets are expensive, a quad turret may cause some concern for maintenance. It's good practice to have more MSP than your Max Repair value to avoid random breakdowns before your supplies run low, and more than twice your Max Repair value is beneficial because it means field repairs are possible. Quad turrets may force you to run additional engineering spaces to match these break points or your desired maintenance life.
I prefer to err on the side of large, efficient components and the engineering overhead to make them work, but it's something to be aware of.