dont know about beam weapons being shortest range - if they're focussed right, as there's no attenuation in space it will happily keep going (almost) forever, and as its much faster than a missile would still be useful at much longer range.

I would swap the ranges - the slowest would be the least use at long range so missiles would be shortest range - missiles are only the longest range weapon in an atmosphere as then you have to keep powering any projectile due to drag, and beam/energy weapons will attenuate (if we had them theyd still be pretty long range tho )

unless we had hyper/warp drive powered missiles these could be very long range - maybe for late tech!

sorry about the waffle - main point is I like the idea of weapon ranges a lot (maybe tied to some initiative ideas) i would just swap which is which.

You could still calculate damage from missles first, or which ever you decide is long range, then mid range damage then short. If you have a ship loaded with long range weapons and the sensors to use them, they should do some good damage first. Of course any enemy ships with powerful short range weapons that survive can shred the other ships. This would generally be for first contact. After that I would assume any starship captain worth his salt would try to maneuver his ships into the appropriate range. Any ships with equal range weapons on their ships should still cause damage simultaneously.

But... without any tactical combat, what difference would range make?

You could fire on an enemy ship with your long range weapons while remaining out of range of his/her shorter range weapons.

I personally think this sounds like a great idea. Imagine being able to attack an enemy from a location where he could not fire back due to range. Perhaps the higher the tech level the better the range. So, at the end of the tech tree all weaponos may be a lot closer in range.

Great idea Ed1963

I would calculate beam weapon damage first, then projectile, then missile as this bases it entirely on the actualy speed of delivery of the weapon's damage potential.

Range would be better to consider regarding various implementations of technologies, for instance theoretically plasma weapons would be extremely short range, and lasers would be extremely long range, as attenuation (and there is attenuation in space, just to a lesser degree) would be minimal.

I put missiles last as, though the ranges of speed may overlap at points, only the fastest missile would ever achieve a velocity higher than the lowest-end projectile (we're talking mass drives here, not chemically propelled bullets), and it would take much longer, relatively, to accelerate to maximum speed.

What is the problem that this is attempting to fix, exactly?

Because, from my perspective, the weapons don't need to have another stat attached to them.