Weapons guide

Even if you are a peaceful person, having a well balanced arsenal is the first step towards peace. People can't threaten war if you are the one with superior firepower. So let's consider weapons, how to use them and what types of weapons are available. Each type has a different role in combat and it is advised to not build your ships around a single one. Single focus ships are easily countered. Either by another weapon, or by a modulation of shields.

Damage modifiers
To find out which weapon is good against what, use the unified projectile color scheme. Colors define projectile modifiers, meaning higher/lower damage to that certain thing compared to it's base damage.

Blue projectiles and beams have bonus damage modifiers against shields, but reduced damage against armor and functional blocks.

Red projectiles and beams have bonus damage modifiers against functional blocks, but reduced damage against armor and shields.

Green projectiles and beams have bonus damage modifiers against armor, but reduced damage against shields and functional blocks.

Orange projectiles and missiles have explosive damage effects, meaning they can damage blocks below armor

Hybrid colored projectiles and beams usually have two bonuses but not as prominent as the single colored types. Such as Blaster (red/blue) and Plasma (red/green)

Projectiles without colored hue such as vanilla NATO ammo do not have any special damage modifiers

Weapon Types
Sorting weapons into types is tricky, even though these categories seem quite clear, there are weapons that overlap those categories. Such as Plasma, Blaster or Swarmer weapons.

Fast firing weapons:
Gatlings, fast firing lasers, blasters. These weapons don't pack as much damage as other types, but are cheap to build. These small turreted weapons have usually quite high accuracy, so they are quite good when shooting at specific components on a ship. Some of these weapons, especially the gatlings and point defense lasers, are useful in other ways as anti-missile protection.

Fast firing weapons are useful, because constant damage is required to properly overheat the shields.

Large Caliber Guns and High Yield Energy weapons:
These weapons are designed as heavy hitters. They have higher damage outputs than small turrets, but usually have slow turn raters and might have problems with targeting fast movers. But when they hit, you can always count on a decent damage output.

Large caliber guns are useful, because burst damage is required to properly down the shields once they are overheated.

Missiles and Torpedoes:
Those come in guided and unguided variants, all packing decent explosive yield. They can be however countered by anti-missile weapons and by flares. It is therefore smart not to rely on missiles only. Even though swarming your target with a cloud of missiles might get through any defenses eventually.

Missiles are useful, because they deal decent burst damage and are great for volley salvoes.

Utilities:
Flares, Point Defenses, Disruptor Torpedoes and Target designators. Those weapons usually do no damage by themselves, but can help you survive in a fight regardless.

Super Weapons:
Usually large, forward facing emplacements that require a lot of power to charge. And when you shoot it, you should make sure you actually hit something, otherwise the weapon might be useless for a while due to the slow reload speeds. Even with these drawbacks, these weapons can do massive amounts of damage and are good as first or last hitters.