That's actually a good idea--use the turret as an emergency escape capsule. It would probably have minimum thrusters and very little power for those now-nearly-useless guns and next to no shields. We see in the WC movie that fighter cockpits become escape capsules when a pilot ejects, so why not the turrets as well?
This suggests an idea: if the player chooses to eject, his ship and cargo are lost, but he and his crew survive in a turret/lifeboat. The turret by itself has no jump drive, can only go about 50 k/s, has negligable shields and armor (maybe 2 cm/2 cm), and very slow gun recharge (it has whatever guns the player stocked the turret with, but they take like four or five times as long as normal to recharge). The player must then pilot the turret/lifeboat to a base within the same system (being aware that his fighting power is minimal), at which point he can either get a new ship (if they are sold there) or buy a ticket to a place where he can buy one. I got the idea for this from the Privateer remake, where if you eject you are adrift in a suit with thrusters, a hand laser, and minimal protection.