Well I am trying to make a deployable turret that is unbuilt when it is deployed and it needs to be repaired to be built. I've tried adding an unbuilt geometry to the ODF of the turret that is being deployed and I've also tried to make the unbuilt odf the object that is being deployed by the weapon ODF. In both cases, a tripod (minus the gun) appears but there's no collision and it falls through the ground. For safe measure I also remved the -nocollision thing from the respective msh.option files.

Any suggestions?

I'm guessing the unbuilt turret has no collision because whenever one appears in the stock game the turret is already placed and its a static object (the destroyed version).

Place a built one, then set it's CurHealth to zero via lua.

And that will make it unbuilt when it is deployed?

I suppose so. If that doesn't work you could try KillObject() instead.