TF2 should have some rudimentary support for the engineer wielding soldier's rocket launcher, sniper's SMG, or the pyro's flamethrower for the respective factorio weapons to look better if exported.

The default factorio engineer only has one weapon per armor, the gun he uses is generic enough to be used as anything. (I didn't realise this either until I started making the mod haha). So there's no way to switch weapons depending on what you have equipped without a hacky implementation.

However, I was thinking of having different cosmetics for different armor tiers. e.g. the short circuit and Beep Man for the mech armor, or the widow maker and the wrangler glove for power armor, what do you think?

Awwwwww, that's unfortunate! Oh well!
Maybe there's a mod out there that can help with weapon swapping on the model? Either way, sounds like a fun idea!

I agree that it would be really cool, but I couldn't find any mods that try to accomplish this. All the sprites are pre-rendered so I wouldn't be able to swap stuff out while the game is running without a really complex implementation. Unfortunately factorio just isn't designed around that kind of thing.

I spent a lot of time agonizing over which gun he should use, and settled on the default shotgun because it looks the funniest, the widowmaker was a close second because it's so generic. If lots of people find the shotgun too weird when used as other weapons, I'll definitely swap it out for something else. Would be keen for any suggestions on other candidate weapons