Replace "hard" max weapon range with "soft" max range

CGDW

Right now all weapons are bound by a "hard" maximum range, which consists of 2 components:
-weapons can only fire at ships that are in range
-all shots disappear after either a calculated distance based on range and velocity or when their timer runs out

Now, for the purpose of ensuring that fights happen with both ships on the same screen, making for a more cinematic experience, and the secondary purpose of ensuring that the simulation will not have to keep track of thousands of projectiles flying off into the far reaches of space, hard max range does its job. I believe it has several issues though:
-a ship with superior range and maneuverability can (theoretically) defeat an infinite number of inferior ships, without any damage whatsoever
-it breaks immersion to see, for example, a powerful railgun shot just disappear 1 meter before it hits something
-it breaks immersion that huge ships (10M+) basically have to rub skin against each other to do something. Hardly an issue without big ships mod but even for vanillas biggest ships it feels off.

So here's my suggestions that I think would fix those issues (while probably creating new ones):
-a ships weapons can target any ship if it's within vision range, or within vision range of an allied ship that has a targeting relay component or something. Wouldn't want it to be too easy to use allied vision in multiplayer, after all.
-energy/ammo consumption re-balanced to more heavily punish missed shots. Holding fire until you get close enough should be the standard of play.
-shots no longer disappear*. Instead, weapons use other mechanics to limit their effective range. These can be generic, or weapon specific. I will list what I have in mind for some weapons.

Laser/electrobolt shots: lifetime dependent damage falloff. The longer the shot flies, the less damage it does, down to a minimum.
Cannon shots: their slow projectile speed already strongly limits their effective range. Unsure if further limitations would be required.
Missiles: can only home for the first X seconds of flight, during which they try to set themselves on an intercept course towards their target.
Ion beam: distance dependent damage falloff, in this case maybe down to 0, because it's instantaneous and can't be dodged. The beam could become more and more transparent the further from its origin.
Railgun: it should shine the most at the longest of ranges. I guess just give it .5 degrees of inaccuracy and balance it through firing rate/energy cost.

*for the sake of the simulation, shots should still disappear once they are far away enough from the action.

Now I understand that this suggestion is very radical, basically a re-design of combat, and I really doubt Walt will go for it, but I wanted to throw it out there and hear your thoughts.

Walt

It's worth thinking about, but there are some big problems that would need to be solved:

How to visualize to the player that a weapon is doing less damage because of range, and, ideally, how to visualize to the player how much damage it will do before it even shoots.
The user interface needs some way of letting the player pick a range at which weapons will shoot, and this needs to be quick enough to use during battle.
The AI needs to be able to pick appropriate ranges depending on circumstances. It needs to wait until short range when it can but fire at long range if it has to. There also needs to be some similar mechanism that decides this for player ships for those players that don't want want to micromanage their weapons.

CGDW

While a weapon is selected it'll show something like this
The standard range at which weapons will fire will be the same as the distance that you've set with the attack command. Could use an average of preferred range among all weapons if this distance is not set manually. And just like you can change the desired position with the shift key, another key would allow you to drag an image of your ship along the attack line to set firing distance to be something else.
Use a preferred range stat on all weapons. AI will check whether it's actually making it to its preferred attack distance, and if not, it'll just fire. If a player doesn't micro his ship at all, the ship will begin firing when it reaches its set attack position.

Lafiel

Ideal range is already in use and it's always less than maximum range. And usually the target ship is supposed to have gotten closer by the time the shot reaches it. Ordinary ships won't benefit from this. This is more addressed toward Kites or targets that are faster than your ship or making sure the target does not escape the fire zone.

Just add a % setting similar to flight direction and save it with the ship file.
This is the more interesting part. Let the AI decide based on the speed capability difference of both ships. If the target is a faster ship use longer range otherwise shorter range.