What exactly is happening with hard points that have the inserted item represented multiple times? (ie the ones with white lines/dots to more than just one position)
is this just graphical or is that item actually being replicated 2/3 times?
eg The tribe Sunset Fighter has 1 Hard point, but it has lines to two spots on the fighter, or on heavier designs it actually draw multiples of that chosen item in those positions, can someone please clarify this for me?
This is purely cosmetic, you actually only get the effects of one turret. So if You get three turrets, there will be three shots but the hit and miss calculation is done only once for all three, not once for each one. I bet point defenses count missiles fired from such turrets as only one (or one volley of in the case of multilaunchers) missile(s). The point being to get more gratuitous pew pew without making things overpowered.
One interesting thing to note -Jukelo touched on this point - is that modules in these nodes behave differently. For example, beam weapons will fire multiple beams while missiles act as if there’s still only one hard point and fire a single missile. IMHO - I wish these locations were more than cosmetic as I like the idea of strategic weapon planning and placement.
/signed
thanks for your answers btw
I was thinking of something similar…that it would be neat that if you put a weapon in a slot that linked to a group of hardpoints, (Like the Swarms cruisers,) that it would enhance the damage…but that would make some hulls completely overpowered compared to others…
Absolutely. Any gray area here between “lovely but superficial element” and “instantly-imbalancing hull buff” is about the width of an electron. 
If you were going to do this right it would actually be a nerf. Essentially you would lose a hardpoint but one of the hardpoints would count for double for each instance of a current multi-hardpoint. This would obviously make fine tuning things harder. I like it just the way it is.
There is a cool thing thing that Cliffski did that Multiply hardpoint will join to form one beam like the death stars main laser. I do not reamber how it works or if i was misunderstanding it but I do reamber something about it one youtube, and cliffs blog.
You forgot that it’s been a key feature of the Swarm, intended for their Disruptor weapons.
Well I thought it was a part of somerace, but I have no DLC so I’m not sure if it was me being a forgetful idot or not.
[/quote]
I like you; no need to call yourself an idot. That’ll just make Steve Jobs of Apple want to sue you for trademark infrigement. 
I thought the convergence was supposed to make the beam more powerful, but I didn’t really notice a difference. Perhaps it’s descriptive flair?
AFAIK, it’s strictly a visual bit of fluff that’s awesome to watch. Just relax and watch das blinkenlights.
Oke, the béstest way of equiping a fighter, is to just loose the reactor, put in a rocket, then create a second desighn and put in those ones a target painting laser. then, when you deploy em, have one eskort/ guard the other. It’s important that the distance you let those rocket shooters shoot, is natural, in formation etc.
This way, your fighers are simply too fast to deal with.
Laser shooting fighters are slower because they can’t keep up.
they do sóme significant damage still, if you’d armor them up,
but it still is crappy.
You can allso use fighters as teriffic decoys, cruisers will keep shooting all their heavy slow targetting gear at them.
It is by far the easyest way to deal with that problem. fighers still kill em though, as do anti fither weapons and tractor beams.
What you want to do is to about this is letting those weaponless generator less fighters have a fighter supportbay for them to return to.
It’s thé best way I know to deploy fighters.
You can’t make one stack of fighters escort or stay in formation with another stack of fighters, only escort or stay in formation with a ship. At least in 1.47.