(Speaking of WWII mainly) In real life, the gunner doesn’t swing the turret around while trying to stabilize the gun constantly. It remains still, quiet, until the commander spots a target.
It’s possible to lock your turret and gun in game, using the driver vision mode or binoculars, but as you’ll probably understand, those greatly reduce the FOV, and positional awareness is heavily affected too.
How could this apport something to the game? Well, the biggest benefit of this would be improving urban combat gameplay. Don’t know if it’s just my case, but when I’m on 3rd person and move my tank close to a building the gun automatically aims up and the turret also moves randomly, stealing you a precious ammount of time in case you’re waiting for an enemy to show, which can be deadly in close quarters combat. I believe this could be fixed with this “lock gun on 3rd person camera” feature.
It would be really easy to implement, you just need to add a key Gaijin!
Uh… okay. Like for peeking a corner.
If your tank has a cupola MG or secondary weapons, you can bind a key to “select MG” or " secondary weapon" and that will set “focus” of the aiming circle for that instead of the turret and it won’t move even if you turn the hull. You just have to remember to go back to main gun.
Another is with free look X & Y set to keys instead of mouse aim, is just to remember to move the mouse together with the turn of the hull so the gun stays at the same angle. Takes a bit of coordination…
If it were easy, it wouldn’t be WT.
There’s already a “lock gun on 3rd person free camera” feature.
Under Controls → Common → View Controls → “Fix gun direction in mouse view” switch to on. Then whenever you mouse look/free cam your turret will be locked into place. It’s not a toggle, so you’ll have to keep pressing the button but it’s a thing. Otherwise as Exocetta said a “toggle” workaround is weapon selecting a MG instead of main gun.