police towers did work pretty simple: when you opened fire on someone that had no PvP flag, you got a red skull flag, and when you entered the range of the tower, it killed you in one shot. (exception, some insane shield tanks could survive a few shots)

they got removed because the punishment had no lasting effect. you could just undock from the terminal like nothing had happened, nor got your standing reduced.

and well, you know, turret AI is very unpredictable in this game

thats a questionable thesis. lets see how well the turret AI on Gamma will be regarding responding to friendly fire.

thats what happened on ics alpha and led to the current no-pvp zones...
imagine what would happen if your standing with the npc corps would have an impact on those police towers? when your down in the reds they would just shoot you without agression, and the standing of your agent, and your corp would drop when you shoot at someone without pvp flag on npc-faction islands.

it wasn't done, because pvp corps would have ended stuck on beta islands, and eventually had to rely on alpha dewllers to deliver goods to beta. it would have suddenly had a consequence to just shoot everyone that just came through a teleporter.

thats would have been just to complex for m2s

How they worked in Closed Beta would not be the way to have them now. Like Jita said they could be done better now.

Think low sec in eve with the gate and station guns when someone shots another player near them. But in perp it was instant death for the aggressor.

What's the point of police towers? Why invent something new? (Well, re-invent)

If you want security just spawn a bunch of mobs that de-spawn when they've done their job. Even opens up the possibility of zones having different calibre of mobs.

The main reason is to have a progression of security. Right now we 100% safe or 100% unsafe. Islands that have a mix of secure and insecure areas give a progression of game play to a certain aspect.

These type of areas also lead to different styles of game play than the islands with 100% unsafe areas.

Yes, I get that. But why re-invent the police tower when there's a perfectly good way to implement security progression now without having to bother.

Using the existing mechanic for spawning NPCs in gangs that range from "barely able to scratch the paint" to "Swarm of double-hard bastard Observers".

You commit a misdemeanor and wham! A proportionate force spawns, kills you and then de-spawns. Proportionate force can depend on anything you like really: you, your bot, your buddies, the level of security in the area, the time of the day, your relations, your corp relations etc etc.

Exploitable for gain, sure, it's bound to be ... a bit. How much depends on the detail. The main point is that using an existing mechanic and some thought a really fluid progression of security system can be created that has consequences across other parts of a players game.

i like instant punishment better then delayed one by npcs that first need to spawn, then lock the target, etc...

police towers weapon is listed as missile launcher with missiles - but because of the delay between agression and punishment it was not good enough to prevent alpha suicide ganks.
later when the extension levels of the bad guys, and their assets grow so high that it was enough to just undock with 6 t1 loot fit kains on alpha to alphastrike any noob undocking, it displayed that even instant death was not fast enough (it need instant death of all agressors before their weapon fires to be efficient)

But no matter how and how FAST the punishment is carried out - its useless if it only means the loss of a robot for the agressor and nothing else.

Yeah...If we could stop recycling old content that would be great.

My idea was that Alpha 1 islands would not change and would stay 100% safe.