I did alredy put something similar in my feedback post, but after watching the dev stream i put some more tought into the idea... so here is it.

The basic idea is to have different variations for every weapon. so rather than have, lets say, a generic laser you can chose between various variations of laser weapon, be it a point defense or a  turret, with different stats and purpose.

this way you can create vessels with very specific roles and make the battles and fleet compositions more interesting and varied.

here some ideas for weapon variations.

tiny: used only on tiny ships, it cut the weapon range to 50% but uses a bit less space (tiny ships should only use this variation, to give them a smaller range but decent dps)

normal: as it is now, used on all ships cept the tiny ones, the base versatile weapon

oversized: used on medium (but very hard to fit there), large and huge. it use a lot more space than the normal version, but also deal more damage, dmg/space and have more range (eg 170%-200%) on counter it have lower rof (dps/space should be a bit lower than normal) also can only be used against medium, large and huge ships. so is a sort of "artillery"

turret: used only on large and huge. it use a bit more space than oversized but have less range than them (lets say 20-30% less than oversized) and less Alpha dmg but with higher rof (dps/space higher than normal and oversized) it also can target ship from small to huge making it more versatile

ventral: used only on huge ship. it uses a huge amount of space (lets say 50-60% of huge hull with all upgrades), it deals massive damage at huge ranges but with a very low rof but it can only target large and huge ships. (the overall dps/space should be the best by a good margin)

point defense: used on all ships cept tiny, low range, very high rof/dps but diminuished dmg vs bigger hulls eg 100% dmg vs tiny, 25% vs small, 10% vs medium, 5% vs large/huge/structures. a weapon that will automatically fire on the smallest ship in range.

the role and behaviour of the vessel should vary depending also by the weapon mounted...

first i think all the vessels should try to fight at their optimal range, it make more sense than just running into each other and should help to alleviate the "bumping" problem we see in the battle viewer.

with this in mind to have weapon variations with different ranges can make the battle more interesting... you will have the smaller ships trying to get into range of the bigger/more valuable ones, while the big capital ships can dominate the field with their turrets (not running into each other anymore ), point defense ships will try to protect them from the nasty fighters and so on.

with different variations in fact will be easier to make ships with different roles... i can fit a medium ship with all point defenses weapons and shields to make a counter AA ship to protect my fleet from carriers. on the same hull i can put maybe a single oversized weapon and a few point defense ones to make it a sort of artillery ship, that stay in the backline and have some protections vs fighters...

also with this kind of diversity fleet composition can become more relevant, my fleet with huge ventral mounted capital ship, may be able to tear apart an enemy fleets with more versatile turret mounted large and huge caps, but may suffer more vs fleets composed by smaller ships. a full carrier fleet (atm quite op) can be in troubles vs a fleet full of point defense vessels and so on.

and last but not least it will make ship design easier, as it will be waaaaay better/faster to fit 3 turrets on a huge ship rather than 30 normal guns

this is just an example but i really thing that to have weapons variations will benefit the game in many areas... ship design, fleet composition, tactic, battle view, even modding

well ofc is just a wish sorry for the long post and bad english