Ok, so was playing around today with designing a 50t fighter using Ion Tech.
Basic Ship systems:
Between the Crew Quarters -Fighter, the Engineering Space -Fighter, the Fule Storage - fighter, and the composite armour, that already accounts for 11tons.
That leaves 39tons for the engine, fire control & weapon system.
a .3HS engine (15 tons) at 200% provides 7.5ep, or enough to get a 50t fighter to 7,500 km/s. That sounds fair for a Ion Fighter. Now we have a weight of 29t, leaving 21t.
The fire control is a SW, 0.2x range (12,800 km) and 2x tracking speed (8,000 km/s) which comes out as .1 HS or 5 tons. This brings our total up to 34t with 16t left for a weapon system.
The smallest weapon systems currently are a .5HS (25t) Gauss cannon, with 8% innate accuracy, or a single shot, 10cm rail gun at .975HS (49t) plus a .6HS (30t) power plant with a 30% boost, for a total of 79t.
The Gauss fighter, at 62t is pretty close to the goal, the Railgun fighter though, comes in at 121t, which is not what i am looking for. So to keep the weapon power/HS roughly equal, i am looking for something about 1/2 the power of a .5HS gauss or 1/5 the power of a SS 10cm rail gun.
Weapon Efficiency:
The fire control i designed has 22% accuracy at 10,000km. For the rail gun that means 2.64 hits per 12 shots. (1 hit every 30secs)
for the .5HS Gauss, the actually weapon accuracy after the 8% modifier is 1.76%. Which is 1 hit per 60 shots. (1 hit every 100secs @RoF3/75sec @RoF4)
Since the SS 10cm railgun (+Reactor) come out as a little over 3x the weight of the .5HS Gauss, this is pretty even.
Now Steve mentioned toying with the idea of weapons that had a chance to damage-on-hit. A new Weapon tech, lets call them auto-cannons for simplicity for now. You have 4 "levels". 20cal, 30cal,40cal & 50cal (2cm,3cm,4cm & 5cm), incrementing in 5,000 per tech level. So 5,000rp for 2cm, 10,000rp for 3cm, etc. All auto-cannons have a max range of 10,000km. Since ideally i thinking of actual bullets being fired by these weapons, no need for a Power supply like a railgun. As the caliber of the Auto-cannon goes up, the chance to penetrate also goes up. So a 5cm would have 50% chance per hit (so 1 damaging hit per 60 sec), and a 2cm would have a 20% chance per hit (so roughly 1 damaging hit every 150sec). Rate of fire will stay as 1 per 5 seconds (of course this is really more of 1 volley per 5 seconds). An additional tech can be introduced that increases the penetration chance by 1% per level. So at max tech a 5cm has a 60% pen chance as opposed to 50%. Since gauss improves RoF with tech, having ACs improve pen% with tech should be balanced.
So currently, there is no true "ammo" (not counting missiles). And it's been mentioned to avoid "special cases" since Steve wants to eliminate them, though i include this just to float the idea: Each ship with an AC has to load "ammo" (into the weapon like loading a missile into a launcher or a fighter-pod). Ammo is crafted in a missile factory, and each instance of "ammo" will allow each AC to fire a certain # of times. "Ammo" can be transported like missiles in a magazine, each "ammo" weighs 1MSP (2.5t) and if detonated explodes with the force of a size 1 warhead.
edit: I should add that reloading would be handled exactly like box launchers/missile launchers on parasite craft.
The Number of shots each weapon gets per "ammo" is based of the size of the weapon. A 5cm uses X amount of "ammo" per shot (2% for example), a 4cm, being 80% the size of 5cm uses Y=x*.8 (1.6% in this example). 3cm would use 1.2% and 2cm would use .8%. This would give a 5cm AC 50 shots, a 4cm 62 (rounded down), 3cm 83 (rounded down) and a 2cm 125.
TLDR Weapon Stats:
Max Range: 10,000km
RoF: 1 shot per 5secs
Weapon Sizes: 2cm,3cm,4cm,5cm
Weapon damage: 20% chance/hit for 2cm, 50% chance/hit for 5cm
Weapon sizes: 2cm =.3HS (15t), 3cm = .425HS (21.25t), 4cm = .55HS (27.5t), 5cm = .8HS (40t)
Tech Cost: 5,000RP Increments
Thoughts? This should be much more balanced then my original idea, essentially being scaled down versions of single shot railguns with a set max range.