In my opinion plasma cannon stays effective longer then by adding the flechette in between the plasma and the neutron.

it may have the advantage of a higher velocity, but as I see it that gets severely offset by the spread of its projectiles making it more into a <75m efficient weapon. while the plasma has the ability to stay effective untill around the 150m mark.

Anyway the biggest reason why I stil consider such a gimmick weapon to be higher level is because you zoom pas tthe first levels... even newbs can get up to level 3 in 2 - 3 days. After that though the actual growththrough time becomes slower and slower(exponentional). And as a recompensation I was under the impression that keeping a gimmick weapon at the mid levels wouldn't be that bad of an idea.

At higher levels we have the special ships(nation elites) and concussionmines. Early levels we have a nice diversity of weapons albeit lacking i nefficiency.
Midlevels it is always a variation based on a previous design eg : plasma cannon hx, ion blaster mk4 etc...

but like I said, if the majority prefers to put them lower then go ahead... don't care that much to be honest. Just found it a bit more logical to keep it mid level.

Still think the popcorn gun would be the perfect bridge between the plasma HK and the neutron blaster. It's got some cool graphical effects that would be nice to show off to newbies on their 8 hour trial.

And it still makes no sense that you get the neutron blaster before the flechette cannon.

Decrease the mass to 550.
Decrease the energy consumption by 1.
Put the required levels at 3/3/3 or something of the like.

Now that's what we call tweaking.
I didn't say bring the mass down to 100.
I didn't say reduce the energy by 50%.
So...... this won't imbalance things but it sure will give me the incentive to play with them.

Oh yeah Nerde just brang me down to 8% with two flechettes and a rev C.
I had a rev C, 1 neut III and an orion phase blaster.

They are OK but need a mass reduction at best.