1. Please: Make additional tech line of Jump Engines: Personal Only. (Military only/maybe also commercial)
They would cost 50% of size and cost and tech would reduce that to say 30%. They could transport only the ship with this engine.
Same rules as other engines (except squadron size obviously).
2. Rename Beam Fire Control do Direct Fire Control? (It sounds a lot better to me dont know what about the community. )
3. Make Artillery Cannon (a variation of Railgun, same logic as Particle Lance vs Particle Beam ) only 1 shot, same damage pattern, huge range, big size, low tech rp, slow reload, low energy cost. . . . analogy: Macro Cannon. . . . Just some huge conventional (gas boosted) basic cannons. Separate Tech researching max size while using railgun launch velocity, (and obviously capacitor recharge rate tech)
Balance wise, it would essentialy work like a long ranged plasma carronade with slower reload and lower damage, and with low-tech cap.
3b: possibility: expand those Artillery Cannon to have possibility to Flak, or Fragmentation Flak. Logic: it would have a chance to damage a set number of things in 1 group. Aka: % chance for each shot to damage max X (7) of missiles (fighters). This could be viable PD, or anti small ship but should be weak vs, Med to larger ships. Low reload time. Good counter to swarms of fighters or missiles.
4. Just rename some weapons (and tech lines) as tech progresses. Or give players an option to do so:
Example: Microwave beams from tech level 5 (or some tech level where it makes sense, like a bigger jump in efficiency) to Ion Cannon.
Particle Beams later to Neutron, Antiproton, Multi-Particle. It would be just a new name. No new functionality. The best would if players could specify those names before starting play. This would help imagination a lot making research slightly less tedious.
5. Please, expand tooltips (text infos) when researching things. To give (especially new) players more info about what this thing is doing etc. I believe this is a little work but saves a lot of time googling or browsing wiki for others.