For me... Often enough for me to keep the mine on the ship. :p

But as the Shoe of Deadliness(+3) said... Shields have to be down for it work.
Which is why turrets are awesome. I don't need to broadside anything to tear down shields with all weapons.

I have a retired Eng/Cruiser that uses 6 turrets and a fore and aft quantum launcher. And now I have a Tac/Cruiser at Captain level that uses 2 fore cannons, 2 fore photon torps, and 3 aft turrets. I like this build even better. I even received some comments on it when I was doing a Starbase 24 along side two other Cruiser captains that were using beams. They both wanted to know my equipment and build because I was destroying stuff just as fast as the couple of Escorts that were in the instance.

I obliged and didn't have the heart to tell them part of their DPS issues were due to the way they were flying their ships. They were pretty much flying how I was flying, attacking targets in their forward arc. For me, that was the way to fly, for them it was completely wrong. They needed to be broadsiding. You cannot expect to DPS when half your weapons are not shooting anything.

Even without rapid fire?

Oh I use rapid fire, but even without rapid fire I was out DPS'ing the beam cruisers, not because my build is so awesome, but because they weren't fly to their max potential. They should have been broadsiding but they weren't. In a nutshell, I had twice as many weapons shooting the targets.

Oh, I always attack my enemies in space from my left or right side, so I can use both aft and fore beams at the same time. Of course that drains the energy more, butt that's what we have EPS cunsoles for.

I tried Turrets out once. Didn't like them and went back to the 6 beams 2 torp. setup. You just need to know how to fly your crusier. I love the broadside dps i get. I don't know why some feel they have to face their target all the time. I love moving around them when fighting. You have skills that help with that too.

well no ones ever been killed by an all turret cruiser in pvp, i can tell you that hehe. its hard enough to kill with dual cannons and beams and torps, let alone an all turret ship. although that being said its my engineer in a battlecruiser, so he doesnt have attack patterns to buff damage, just an unbelievably strong tank with 125 weapon 125 shield 100 engine and 125 aux power up most of the time (note only the engine and aux spend any time below that)

youre getting more total damage on a target over time with all turrets because its ignoreing you, shrugging off your insignificant attacks, regenerating its shields and healing its hull. you have no burst, its never gonna die if it has any healing at all hehe. at least a beam torp setup can send in high yields and pop a beam overload to drop a shield face so they can hit the hull, every 30 seconds per rank of said abilities on hand.

I ALWAYS use turrets. I love them... and using Phaser beams and tetryon turrets on a cruiser always makes me smile as the Orange beams and Blue cannon fire make me think of the Kelvin in Trek XI

On my admiral I run a cannon cruiser - 3 cannons front + tri cobalt, 2 turrets rear + photon mines and the breen deathblossom thingy. Cannon rappid fire I with maxed out skill/cooldown and I regularly out DPS any other crusier I tangle with during the Undine fleet action. Got some nice comments from some (IMO) fairly skilled cruiser drivers who were wondering why my weapon FX looked the way they did. Pew-pew-pew!

Cannons and turrets get an unreasonably bad rep. Max DPS in one stituation does not equal best weapon overall .