If we're asking for more customization in weapons, I'd rather PGI do that through Weapon Manufacturers. Reason being is because after a while you start getting Module stagnation. Where literally you have to buy almost every module to adapt to the FOTM. Basically, the different weapon manufacturers are preset weapon configurations.
Ideally, you have your basic balanced medium laser, and then 2-3 other different types that you can unlock and rank up for GXP and c-bills. So it's what, 2100gxp to unlock a module, and between 3-6 million c-bills to buy a module? PGI can either charge an upfront GXP to unlock the weapon, and then upgrades would only cost c-bills.
Different Manufacturers would varying in heat, damage, range, cooldown, even visual appearance of the weapon effect; such as: different coloured lasers, different flame colour/type for missiles, different AC firing sounds and impact effects (bonus points for scaling effects; higher rank weapons look fancier or different than their rank 1 counterparts.
Check this out for various beam effects. ).
All weapons now have a "rank up" feature like we have now for modules. it's all condensed into pre-made weapons. 5 ranks per weapon. Rank 1 weapons comparatively will have minor differences. Rank 5 weapons will have a lot of + and -'s between each other.
This is just as an example:
Medium Laser Manufacturer #1:
DESCRIPT._| Rank 1| Rank 5
Range_____| 500___| 300
Damage____| 5_____| 7
Cooldown__| 1_____| 1.2
Duration__| 1_____| 1
Heat______| 8_____| 6
Medium Laser Manufacturer #2:
DESCRIPT._| Rank 1| Rank 5
Range_____| 550___| 700
Damage____| 5_____| 3
Cooldown__| 1_____| 1.5
Duration__| 0.8___| 0.6
Heat______| 8_____| 10
Etc.
So just an example to show that they start off very similar, and when upgraded will perform very differently.
The trouble here would be weapon overlap. You don’t want an upgraded Rank 5 Small Laser to have similar stats as a Rank 1 Medium Laser, and vice versa.
Edited by MoonUnitBeta, 10 March 2016 - 01:49 PM.