A suggestion of small balance if it has not been changed already...
I think that the 15cm laser at 4HS is too small, it's general DPS is way to effective very early, especially when you consider that 15cm lasers can have really long range too they are extremely effective in general in comparison with most other lasers. They often even can compete with high damage lasers in terms of cutting through enemy ship armour through cheer DPS, almost no other laser can do this as effective as the 15cm.
10cm is 3HS
12cm is 4HS
15cm is 4HS
20cm is 6HS
25cm is 8HS
30cm is 10HS
15cm lasers should have a size of 5HS.
I also think that weapons perhaps should be able to have fractions of HS as well to balance them a bit better.
In addition to this larger weapons also often get shafted due to not being able to produce enough capacity to synchronise with the 5sec charge rate per turn. I think that capacity that is over from a previous turn should go into the weapon in the next turn (after it fired) so a weapons might fire in say 4 turns sometimes and 5 turns times. This should even out the benefit of different weapons and make it easier to select a weapon type that best fit the ship you are trying to design. Right now, certain weapons simple are not usable as they synch very badly with the capacitor tech. Take the 20cm laser that is really good at capacitor 5 but really inefficient at any other lever in comparison with a 15cm (even if the size was increased to 5HS) until capacitor 10 where it still is marginally better than a 15cm laser due to its larger size but higher damage and better capacitor tech finally make it better, but not by that much.
In the same spirit perhaps you should be able to fire weapons even more often if you can deliver enough power to do so, like a 10cm lares cold fire twice with a capacitor 6 for example.
You could then also redo how rail-guns work a bit so the capacitor sort of dictate how often they fire rather than they firing 4 shots every time they fire, which seems a bit odd when they fire four shot but only every 20sec instead of one shot every five seconds.
This obviously would effect balance between Gauss and Rail-guns so would have to be handled with great care. I think that Gauss in general are very under powered weapons in general when you compare them with rail-guns, both in therms of technology and cost as rail-guns can use the same fire-control as all other beam weapons while the Gauss require turrets and fast firing fire-controls.
Changing this would also "fix" rail-gun versus Gauss balance as early rail-guns would perhaps only fire ones or twice per turn and increase in speed later on, it would also make rail-guns semi useful for PD even later on.
I think that weapons could be shown with true fire speed rather than per 5 second turns... although the game would make a weapons sometimes fire one or two shots in a turn or more or less turns in between shots.
