Weapons - should there be more differences?

they probably haven't been implemented yet as the drengin had psyionic blasters and the others had different unique weapons and/or defences?

Based on racetype would be great, unique to each race (letting modders select which race to use or mod in their own tech), would be amazing.

I want big guns for use against capital ships and little guns for use against small ships.

I would like missiles to be able to launched from a distance with an estimated impact so I can do a TOT (time on target) attack with energy weapons at the same instant.

I agree, would be really cool.  Might pose a very difficult balancing challenge though.

I think the way to go with this is to have race-specific weapon augments, but keep the base weapons the same.

When you say too alike you mean all races have the same. At some point this might change, but in general I am happy with the balancing and variations between the weapons, and defenses. Each is good at something, although beams aren't to balanced right now, they are considerably worse than other weapons in several categories.

This sounds very interesting to me.    The problem would be implementation, I suppose.

Not too likely for the base game. Maybe something they can add later on down the road though as things get fleshed out more.

I haven't tried playing with it... But it -looks- like StatTypeGroupDefs.xml -might- allow us to make a fourth weapon type & the more fine grained techtree/shipconponents/etc itmight be possible to have multiple defense types on each defense item (or weapon

I think that the tech should at least be as different as the last game if not more. I like individualised techs the more the merrior.

With the combat viewer now  in, I think that this becomes a bigger priority.