For certain weapons, most notably missiles and antimatter blasters, they are frequently used by quickly switching to them, firing, and switching back. This can get a little awkward, particularly if you want to continue firing some other weapon at the same time - right now you have to enable autofire for your current group, switch to missiles, fire, switch back, disable autofire. Why don't we add a setting that makes pressing the button to select the group instead fire it?
I know this has come up in the past, but I feel there was no good way to integrate the idea into the UI before. With the new weapon group UI, I think there is now a good way to use this idea - on the refit screen where you select autofire groups, you can add another row along the top called Quickfire, which would on a per-weapon group basis enable this idea: If Quickfire was enabled for weapon group 3, pressing 3 would fire off a shot from that weapon group (or multiple if the group was linked).
The AI could entirely ignore this setting for AI-controlled ships; after all, they don't have any problems rapidly switching between weapon groups like humans do!
There is already a little discussion of this idea (and some enthusiasm!) in this thread:
http://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=2483.0, but I felt it appropriate to start a thread in Suggestions regarding the idea.
Any thoughts?