Messages

Looks good!

I would have one path for gun size, and a separate path for each weapon type, for 5 over all paths in addition to the consumable tree. The gun size would provide you the ability to mount those guns on your ship.  The weapon type path would start out generic and specialize down 2 separate routes for each weapon type. 

Energy weapons would have 2 paths - a sheer damage output path, and a more efficient ammo/energy usage path.  Each step along this path might add 2% better to that type of weapon - regardless of size.  Effectively, you have a dps, and a sustainability split between the two.  Perhaps even some of the steps could lower or raise damage for the inverse impact to energy efficiency.  This way a pilot can decide if they are going to configure their guns for pure damage output at a cost of energy or low energy use at the cost of slightly decreased damage.

Ballistic weapons would have 2 paths - rate of fire, and ammo bank (magazine) size.  Each step along this path would increase ROF by 2-3% and magazine size by 5%.  Again, this would split dps increase vs sustainability.  A final step in the ROF line might be large, but also cause a +5 spread on weapons due to the vibrations of gun barrels.  The last step in magazine size might cause the entire ship to be slower due to larger mass on board.

Missiles could also have 2 paths.  Increased homing ability vs increased damage.  The last step in the homing chain might cause the missiles to go slower due to having to divert more thruster power to side vents, and the last step in the damage chain might cause the missile to move slower due to the increased payload of the weapon.  Alternatively for homing you could use faster Rate of Fire like ballistics.

Mines I could see having a damage path and a payload path similar to the ballistic weapon paths.

If I had the chance - I'd also add an 'experimental' weapon path for weapons that don't exactly fall along the lines of ballistic or energy.  (Like the acid gun the aliens have).

So - a bit of a bug I encountered.

I have been beating my head against a wall trying to get ANY mod to work - but I kept getting a "Cannot find Byte Order Marker, Cannot Switch to Unicode" error when trying to load a server.  In single player the server doesn't load, but there isn't any nice console message why.

I went through all my mod files.
I uninstalled (completely) and reinstalled about 20 times.
I went through all the newest mod (beyond the core).  I couldn't figure out what the problem was.  All my xml files were UTF-8.  Then i realized the only file I didnt check was the one that came standard with the game.  ModsConfig.xml.  I open the file, and despite the opening tag telling me the file contents were UTF-16, Notepad++ was asserting that ModsConfig.xml was itself encoded using UTF-8 without BOM.   

So, a quick fix to change the UTF-16 to UTF-8 and convert the xml file in question to UTF-8 (with the BOM), and now my mod loads.

I don't know if its the launcher that changes this ModsConfig.xml file to UTF-8 without BOM, but regardless it breaks mods, so hopefully this can be changed in future?