Right now, frigates have frigate weapons, and cruisers have cruiser weapons.
You can make a mod with frigate or even fighter weapons available for cruisers, but you still only have X hardpoints to put them into.
One solution proposed was to have the ability to assign hardpoints of different sizes on different hulls. So you might have 3 CA hardpoints on a CA, and 10 FF hardpoints.
My idea is that if the above is too difficult, how about THIS.
We know that multiple turrets (pointed to by the same module) are just a visual effect. I wonder if a simple solution might be to have the code actually count such linked weapons as a single attack, but add together the damages in some fashion. In addition, the weights, power requirements etc ALSO add together linearly.
So you make a new CA with just 5 hardpoints, for one hardpoint, it links to 4 spots on the hull, and for another of the hardpoints, you link the hardpoint hexagon to, say, 10 points on the hull. It also has 3 single hardpoints. For argument, this new race has 1 large CA laser, a rapid fire anti-fighter laser, and one tiny PD weapon available (no other weapon modules for simplicity). The large laser weighs 150, and uses 12 power. The rapid-fire weapon weighs 20 and uses 2 power. The PD weapon weighs 4, and uses 1 power. If the player puts the large laser on the spot that generates 10 lasers, the weight added is 1500, and the power requirement is 120. If he instead puts the tiny, PD weapon, the weight is 40, and the power used is 10. Same with the 4 weapon slot. He can have 4 main batteries, but the cost will be 600 weight, and 48 power. By tweaking the weights of different systems, it would be a de facto way of saying that more than X linked weapons is only good for PD, and linking a smaller number might allow different batteries. Note that since they count as one weapon as they do now, they will not split fire, but always shoot at the same target. One possible way around this would be to have them fire with a small delay at the target currently aimed at—a ripple fire. So if the 10 PD weapons had a small delay (10-30 time units), they’d fire at a missile, and then the next fires, and so forth. One will kill the target, then the next will shoot at the NEW target. Main batteries can be set to have a very short (0?) fire interval, and a salvo_interval to what the current fire_interval would be—they’d shoot at once at a single target.