I'm trying to find a reference for this, perhaps someone knows for sure.

If a ship has a dorsal and a ventral laser cannon, does that mean the ship definitely has two gunner positions, for two crew members to operate those guns?

Our party is flying the Loronar E-9 Explorer and I'm planning their first space encounter for next week.

I was reading the stats and expecting Gunner positions to be listed under Crew. It doesn't have Gunner positions listed.

Neither does the YT-1300. Does that mean the stock YT-1300 doesn't have the Gunner positions that Luke and Han used in A New Hope, and the guns must be fired from the cockpit?

The Y-Wing has a Gunner position listed. The Cloud Car has a Gunner position listed.

What about the E-9 and the YT-1300?

Thanks!

Yes, they have gunner positions. The crew listed is more of a optimum performance thing within the sort of framework of what the ship is primarily expected to do. A freighter or explorer aren't necessarily intended to conduct combat missions, so the gunner isn't really an essential to those classes, but as a general rule of thumb if there's a weapon and the ship is big enough, there's a gunner station.

Also this usually, but not always, is to denote weapons the devs felt shouldn't be operated by the pilot (like the y-wing turret).

My group had that same conversation with our GM. We also use an Explorer. At first he decided that the gunner would be the copilot but since we have 4 players between flying, doing stuff in engineering, and co-piloting/shooting this left one character basically out of the space combat. Now we have retconed it to where it is like the Millennium Falcon with two gunner positions.

That was my concern as well, Zayl.

We have 5 players so it works out well if there are 2 Gunner positions in addition to Pilot, Copilot and Engineering.

Nobody wants to be the kid watching everyone else play guns...