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"Be careful. As long as those sentry guns are activated, it's suicide to go out there. But it is the only way to the surface. You're going to have to destroy them."
Rosenberg[src]
 

The Black Mesa Ceiling Turret is an automatic sentry gun built into the ceiling and deployed when any organic matter is detected in front of it. They are found in heavily secured storage areas around the facility for protection against any intruders or other threats. However this proves futile during the invasion due to the fact that they pick up on all life forms, human and alien, making them a great help and a massive threat.

Overview[]

Hl 2019-05-26 12-01-22-876

Half-Life Alpha model.

  • Ceiling Turrets are seen in several places within the Black Mesa Research Facility, concealed within the ceiling in an armored cupola. Some are activated or deactivated by a switch, some deploy automatically. When a switch is available, the player can always use it. If not, the Turret can be disabled with explosives or gunfire.
  • The Ceiling Turrets do not distinguish friends from foes. Therefore, they will attack anything in range, including all Black Mesa employees as well as Xen creatures.
  • The Ceiling Turrets were set possibly to deal with potential escaped specimens, or are perhaps a leftover from the facility's days as a military missile complex.
  • In Decay, Rosenberg simply refers to them as "sentry guns".
  • The Ceiling Turret comes in two variants: a three barreled gun and a smaller single barreled gun.
    • The single barreled features an red targeting lens above the gun barrel, this one deploy faster and can fire almost instantly once deployed and aimed on the target due to it's compact size, but are less durable and deals less damage.
    • The triple barreled variant features an retractable Gatling gun like barrels, and fires much faster, but at cost of long deployment and retract time due to increased size. It features an red light below the armored copula indicating current status of sentry (flashing red means alert while red means engaging target). It requires to wind the barrels first (which leaves themselves briefly vulnerable to enemy fire) before able to shoot. It's much durable and deals more damage. The barrels will spin for a while before stop spinning and followed by retract themselves.

Encounters[]

Half-Life[]

Ceiling mini turret bm

The single-barreled variant.

Though the ceiling turret fits the description of a regular enemy, being moderate damage and easy to kill they only make three appearances throughout the game. The first two appearing in the storage rooms in the chapter Office Complex, posing as obstacles for the player to avoid, destroy, or shut off. They later appear in the Lambda Complex storage facility, in the beginning of Forget About Freeman!, this time working as more of an ally because, unlike most turrets, the switch is right there when the player comes in and is already turned off, giving them the option to turn it on and kill the army of Vortigaunts and Grunts in the room. There are also two turrets in the final room of the Hazard Course; however, these turrets are only deployed upon friendly fire onto either the scientist or the Security guard in the room.

Trivia[]

  • The turret goes into standby and retracts into its cupola if there are no targets in range. However they deploy again if anything comes into range.
  • In the Source version, the turrets in the Hazard Course cannot be destroyed.
    • In Half-Life, killing scientist will not cause the turret to deploy but instead, nearby security guards will attack the player. In Source however, killing any of them will cause the turrets to deploy themselves.
  • Critical damage will cause them to malfunction. This means they will shoot in all directions before exploding.
  • In some rare cases, the Ceiling turrets may not function correctly such as shooting at walls when the player is spotted. Which acts as if it's defective. It may be an glitch though.
    • In Source, the ceiling turrets is incorrectly spawned with "shooting" animation with muzzle flash until they see the player or any enemies, which they will instantly retract into copula and show "deploy animation".

List of appearances[]

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