Yes, i actually do have a couple of thoughts about weapon rewards.
I feel like rockets and ammo are just not worth it unfortunately. Maybe it's just my experience, but i never felt it was necessary to craft even red ammo for space platforms simply because the yellow ammo is produced for much lesser footprint in greater volume and requires no copper, so for my ships that don't have to wander into huge asteroids fields, yellow ammo was almost always a much better choice and i never felt compelled to have more damage than it already provides. And in the huge asteroids space. especially when travelling to shattered planet, gun ammo is kinda irrelevant anyway, so even if i already produce copper, i, again, never felt compelled to use it, since most of the damage is from railguns and explosive rockets and gun turrets are here to just pick up the slack after lasers (vanilla lasers), since energy is quite cheap at this point and not having to drag several fully stacked green belts worth of iron to get that much ammo and then drag several belts worth of ammo around is worth it, especually since lasers have better range, which is great for avoiding friendly fire from your rocket turrets. Ablative gun ammo increases the amount you produce but also increases footprint, especially since you need to generate steam and hydrogen gas and also use pressure forges (which are pretty large) to deal with the unstable plates. The fact that plate stabilization is a lossy recipe and that hydrogen plates stack only to 10 kinda makes me very cautious about using it for longs trips like for shattered planet, i do prefer building ships that are as independent from surface production as it possible.
Rockets i ignored for largely same reason, but additionally is the fact that when you go into far space with huge asteroids, you want explosive rockets, while ablative rockets are basically same as regular ones. If ablative rockets were explosive and especially if they had more damage than regular ones, that would actually make me consider using them, since explosive rocket production was almost always a bottleneck for my speed and used the majority of the resources. Not sure about what to do with gun ammo tbh.
About lasers. Yeah, they are pretty powerful, very much so. Though my main gripe is that i never felt compelled to use anything other than impact lenses because they do most damage to asteroids. I guess if you used mods for enemies that have varied resistances, it would make other ones more useful. I am not sure if nerfing impact lenses would help, because i would just use the next best ones (acid probably). But while they are powerful, it's not like they allow to skip railguns and rocket turrets unless you want to fly snail pace, they mostly allow you to fly faster in the endgame when you have fusion since they eat several times more power than regular lasers, so even with nuclear it would be hard having more than a few of them. They are especially useful in places like Frozetta where you have to park over a planet in space with huge asteroids since you can destroy them with lasers alone and there is no need to drag railgun ammo through your whole ship. I would say that if they had to be maintained i would probably switch back to regular lasers and guns and drag that railgun belt over my while ship, since having a belt running for every laser turret kinda defeats the point of having lasers in the first place. Doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, just sharing my thoughts. Some kind of nerf or overhead wouldn't be a bad idea in general.
I do play mostly in peaceful mode, so i can't really say anything about planetary defences, only about ships.
