Declutter the Experimental Weapons Category in Outfitting

[Disemboweled Ego]

It has seen a lot of bloat and includes:

• Base Human AX Weapons (3 types)
• Guardian Weapons (3 types)
• Azimuth Engineered Guardian Weapons (2 types)
• Enhanced Human AX Weapons (2 types)
• Azimuth Engineered AX Weapons (2 types)
• Guardian Nanite Torpedos
• Shock Cannons
• Enzyme missiles
• Flechette Launchers
• Pre-Engineered Festive Flak (technically 1 type with 4-5 variations)

Many of these have 2-3 sizes each and some have fixed/gimbal/turret variants on top of different sizes, meaning you have at a minimum 14 different base weapons that go under the same category, but more realistically at least 25 to account for many ships having both large/medium slots.

The outfitting UI with the icons is not well designed to handle this, it does not provide any additional useful filtering and the sorting options are kinda useless. There's a lot of scrolling and the human AX weapons of which there are many variants use the same icons and have hard to read labels that span multiple lines due to the Prefix bloat. (Enhanced Anti Xeno). It's not space efficient and it's awful to scroll due to the large icons and few items on screen at once. It would work well if you had just a few items in your inventory, but that's not the case if you're swapping out a full AX loadout (say shards vs multis or multis to rockets) which I feel is more common now with various AX activities requiring different loadouts.

Break this stuff apart, the most obvious way is

• Human AX Weapons
• Guardian AX Weapons
• Human Experimental Weapons

It doesn't solve every problem - now you have more categories and have made a different page of outfitting slightly worse because of that, but that page is actually equipped to handle more icons than the inventory page is (despite everything being too large there.

 

[HRDiagram]

Sensible suggestion. Anything to sort that mess, really.
It's become too confusing.

 

[Greasetrap42]

It is amazing how good the EDSY interface is for module selection.

 

[Hedganian]

The "standard" human AX weapons should either be removed entirely (they're all but useless since the Enhanced ones were released) or, a better option, no longer considered 'experimental' (since they've been widely available for years, that's a pretty long 'experiment') and should just be moved to the relevant Mulicannon/Missile Rack categories thereby making them not count towards the experimental weapon limit on ships as well (maybe even open them up for engineering, which might make them a better choice for some play styles?)

 

[CMDR X]

The outfitting UI with its stoopid icons has been a sack of pigeon droppings from the start.

 

[rootsrat]

Oh yes please! It's an absolute mess

Tbh the whole outfitting could use a major overhaul with ship build presets, search function and much better filtering.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

This is relevant again with the new anti-anti-guardian field engineering since you need to sort out those weapons from the rest in outfitting.

 

[EvoBeardy]

Absolutely for this also.

On a similar but not-the-same subject, I wish they'd make some of the unused Experimental Weapons partially viable with capped level 1/2/3 engineering.
I had an old FAS with Shock Cannons on it from a few years back that I recently bust out, it was hilarious, but I couldn't help thinking that with all the meta and buffs to other weaponry, that it relegates stuff to just not being worth peoples time and going largely unused to people apart from the curious.

Level 1-3 Engineering for stuff like the OG AX weapons would mean that people still have options and there aren't things existing in the game for the sake of it that basically take up space at best.
Like Hedganian said, some of these have been Experimental's for years, so maybe it makes sense for them to have workarounds to make them even slightly more viable by now.