Yeah, the goal would be a coherent starsector universe where the mod factions integrate themselves seamlessly.
And in contradiction to oppose the official lore they would "compliment" it.
- new weapons should contain something unique and not just be a vanilla weapon with tweaked stats, although a retexture is allowed?
Maybe something more like a maximum number of weapons. Pretty much the same approach
as with the ship designs. I think the restrictions of the total amount of weapons your mod could add, would lead to a kind of natual selection
where originality would be the design goal. As an example the Barbarossa cannon offers per se nothing new and is at its core just a tweaked
Hellbore Cannon. Or maybe i misunderstood what you meant with "something unique".
On the other hand i would restrict any retextured weapons, as it is "just" a recolored version. Or what do you mean with retextured?
Mod weapons should accept vanilla weapons as their respective pinnacle. They can be of course as strong as vanilla weapons, but not stronger.
I would propose the highest dps as a cap. This would ensure plenty of room for interessting variations of chargeup, uptime, downtime, burst size and so on.