After months of playing with and thinking about laser and ballistic weapons I just don't understand how you are expecting to balance these 2 damage types. People will always choose the higher performance option, at least in PVP. You can't balance performance of winning in combat with convenience of not having to fly back to restock ammo, especially once Death Of A Spaceman comes in where winning a fight becomes so much more important than it is now. If the idea is that ballistics are a weapon of attrition, their TTK needs to be lower than that of lasers. If the idea is to make mixed loadouts a necessity, across one or several ships, then ballistics need to deal 0 or almost 0 damage while shields are up and lasers 0 or almost 0 damage to anything but shields. I don't know if either of these approaches are a good or a bad idea, but if neither of these are part of the plan, then what is the idea behind the different ammo types?