I am in the midst of giving the Command Center an Alan Turret as a subunit. Unfortunately, I am having a lot of trouble doing so.

(1) Giving the Command Center an Alan Turret through the Subunit 1 option in DatEdit fails to effect any difference.

(2) Giving the Command Center's image.dat entry the Goliath Base's .lol file fails to effect any difference.

Normally, SCBW would crash without a .lol file when giving a unit a subunit. In this case, nothing happens at all -- there is no change from vanilla SCBW.

Is it because structures cannot have subunits or is there another possibility?

Yup, bw does not create subunits for units whose id is above 105.

I did a quick test with copying Command Center's stats to an unit which can have subunits, which created the subunit and crashed as Command Center's construction image did not have .lo file assigned to it. Once the .lo file was set, the turret had difficulties with attackking as the CC didn't turn. Setting weapons.dat firing angle to 128 allowed the subunit to attack fine though.

The turret was not visible - didn't look into why that happens, and I wasn't able to order the CC to attack anything - that apparently was as the unit's buttons had "Attack" button instead of "Attack (Building)".

Buildings with subunits are a horrible mess

Bah, figures. I had wanted a structure with a turret so I could get a specific sort of look and functionality combo. Specifically, I was hoping to cheese a double-Goliath turret appearance on a Stasis Cell .grp.

Do you think there is a chance of altering that via an .exe mod?

Did you create the turret in iscript? I'm not totally sure how the turret is created, but I know the overlay is created with InitTurret

I'm not even sure if that applies considering that the Goliath Base script does not run any opcodes to create its turret's image.

The "unit id must be <= 105" check is simple to remove, just nop 2 bytes at 004A0A53. Other stuff may require more complicated edits.

Have you considered doing something like Missile Turret does? Could be simpler than using subunits even if it were more limited in some ways.

The subunit not appearing may be due to iscript, but I've done a test with adding floor gun trap as Battlecruiser's subunit and I don't remember having to touch iscript at all.

goliath was the one I was looking at: