Ok... ship balancing

[Treewyrm]

Well really... even 8.33 firing speed weapons dont cause -that- much lag, plenty of people are using them here already, they'd just need a different projectile effect - more like the kusari photon blasters.

I think you don't understand the problem. The game is not designed for high refire rate weapons. Just because you can do them doesn't mean you should do that, and in fact you shouldn't - reasons are stated above. Freelancer traces projectiles unlike massive multiplayer games. Each projectile fire instance creates data to be transmitted across network to all players in range of visibility. Add tracing procedures on top of it, collision detection and so on. Each ship can have several such weapons. Plenty of people might not make things bad at first look, because it isn't plenty really, just a few and far in between. But lot of people with lots of those guns - now that's a problem growing exponentially. Large fights already by far are quite laggy, Freelancer isn't scaled up to that kind of things, making things worse even slightly must just be the nail in the coffin. Think about consequences first.