The way how the harpoon turrets work right now is that character hit by harpoon just stay in one place and gets the damage.
How the realistic harpoon hit should look like:
Character that is hit by harpoon should get knocked back into the direction of harpoon fly path (closer to the harpoon turret then bigger travel distance of character.
Additionally - depending on power of the hit (in case of game thinking power = damage) if turret is powerfull enough - knock backed into the direction of harpoon fly path and character can be in ragdoll mode caused by hit. That connects also to the possibility of character losing consciousness (from just taking the hit or as the result of knocback).
To not forget - if turret or by going more into detail: if stretch of string of turret if powerfull enough it can allow to penetrate target and make character travel in ragdoll mode in the shoot direction potentialy impaling targets behind first target - potentialy also causing knockback that was explained before.
Another possibility is harpoon flying through target and impaling character that is behind hit character, causing to first hit character great damage due to literally making hole in it.
Examples of how it should work:
https://youtu.be/Oovmd9_zFYA?t=418
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spY5NYk31l4