(dammit; the forum ate my previous post while I was editing it; sorry)
If you reliably limit particular families of weapons to
individual races exclusively, then such a bewildering hyper-abundance of choice wouldn't be such an irritant. For my part, I would not want to be required to wade through over 262 gun choices every time I wanted to play.
Making the limit on a per-space station basis sounds like the only deployment-control method that we modders have access to right now in Starfarer; I'm glad you're making use of it. Hopefully finer-resolution methods will become available if we ask Alex politely enough.
Regarding the various "Marks" of incremental gun upgrades mentioned in the Trek canonical data: If one were to attempt to shoe-horn
all of them into any particular mod, I think it would be extremely difficult to make every single one of them both tactically distinctive as well as useful. It quickly becomes a maze-like swamp of too much stuff that mostly identical; "distinctions without a difference," you know?
It's easy for some scriptwriter to toss off a fluffy, throwaway reference to something like a "Mark XXIV-j Very Heavy Ultralight New-Type Old Style Battle Beam [Only Fires On Wednesdays]" version.
It's another matter entirely to find a
meaningful role for such a beast, let alone the 23 marks prior to that one, in a battle-oriented game.
