Brace for :words:!
I've been thinking about weapon balance due to 0.7.x being generally more difficult, which makes loadout choices matter more - and specifically, i was thinking about the Medium cEPC, which i used to like, but these days just can't find a place in my fleet for, no matter how snazzy the color scheme. (Preemptively, i checked and SS+ doesn't modify any of the guns i'm about to ramble about)
The vanilla weapons that meet the same role - good range, sustained hard flux pressure, medium energy slot and energy damage type - are the pulse laser and heavy blaster. The mCEPC costs more than either of those (14 OP vs 10 and 12), and is pretty much worse across the board than both. It's main advantage is range; it has 800su range to both vanilla weapons' 600, but it has a minimum spread value and recoil against the other weapons' perfect accuracy, and the popper means that 800 is a hard limit, not the normal soft boundary. Apart from that, it can crack armor better than the PL, or has better flux efficiency than the HB, but you're paying a serious premium in OP for these benefits.
Just so i could make a more informed suggestion than 'gun make sad buff pls', i looked at the IR Pulse Laser versus the basic small CEPC, which i think worked well and is a decision i do find interesting and comparable - those two have the same OP, similar flux profiles, an accuracy/range tradeoff like their bigger cousins, but here the CEPC has better peak but lower sustained damage than the IRPL.
I'm sure there's a bunch of clever things that could be done to the mcepc - a Shard-style damage rider on some condition, an inverse pre-0.7.x-energy-weapon damage bonus at low flux levels, etc. However, i don't know enough to do any of those (yet?), so instead i just mucked around in the weapondata.csv until i had something that seemed cool.
I am by no means an expert at balance, but, for your consideration:
Spoiler
Medium CEPC+,ms_mcepc+,2,2250,800,,210,,8,15,12,20,0.87,2,231,ENERGY,,0,0.975,2,0.25,3,6,2,10,,800,,,30,,5205
Medium rCEPC,ms_mcepc6,2,2250,800,,222,,8,15,12,18,0.70,6,265,ENERGY,,0,1.0,2,0.232,3,6,2,10,,800,,,30,,5205
The first idea is just a general buff to match the IRPL/CEPC paradigm. Reduced OP cost, slightly better peak damage than the PL, significantly worse sustained, at the same flux/shot as before. 5% more damage per hit and 10% faster RoF to bring the DPS up without making it way better against armor. Might even be worth bringing down to 11 OP, as it still isn't really strictly
better than the PL.
The second is my flailing attempt to do something other than just scaling up the CEPC/IRPL. Basically, it acts a bit more like a midpoint between the HB and PL, but one that rewards (requires) you fading back or holding fire to regenerate ammo between salvos. The 'sustained' value is kind of irrelevant because if you run dry the enemy has a good 6-7 seconds to vent, run, whatever.
And honestly, the idea of someone building a turret around a big huge space six-shooter amused me.
Or i guess you could just slash the OP to 10-11 and call it a day, but honestly i didn't think of that until i was elbow-deep in spreadsheets and multiboxed instances of the game
That got kind of boring, so here's a bunch of pictures of what i mean.