I’m going to reiterate…Heat! Dealing with heat is huge in space environments and should be the determining factor for how long you can fire. Let the autocannons be belt fired, but if you fire too long you will melt your barrels. Maybe the sunside barrels melt faster(I know dev time and complicated and all that, but still it would be a neat feature). Allow us to equip/upgrade our ships with better heat sinks and/or radiators to dissipate heat.
One of things that I think Elite did well was heat management and in my opinion it should be in any space shooter/sim worth its salt. Heat is something you cannot just hand wave away. It’s everywhere! And the internal temperature of a ship with a whatever GW(TW? Not sure what sort of handwavium powers our ships) reactor on board is going to generate a TON of heat.
As for the ammo debate, let each type of weapon have their own ammo pool shared across the ship. The belts all grab from somewhere after all. For missiles, let the pod/wing hardpoints fire first…if your ship has the capacity for more let there be a reload timer to reload the pod or belt them back onto the hardpoints.
managing ammo is important part of gameplay. you should implement all variants. reason is a physical size of ammunition and systems needed for reloading or automatic fire. so any option that makes things easier must have penalty.
1)big rockets or torpedoеs are single pod - single use
2)smaller rockets or big single fire turrets are Ammo per-weapon or KISS in case of single fire turrets on capitals.
3)medium auto turrets are #3 where they could fire in automated mode when feeded from the magazine and had to reload from global pool (or local pool if capitals has many of them)
4)small auto turrets could be KISS and fire in full auto until deplition of global or local pool.
any of this variant coud be shifted depending of size of the ship or role. for example Bomber could have torpedo launcher with magazine. or capital ship could have pool of rocket amunition.
lasers could have different energy/heat managing witch works like negative ammo with heat exchangers absorbers and other stuff.
I forgot to mention heat in my post but I totally agree.
Heat should be a significant factor for energy and projectile weapons. Heat should obviously tie in with the sensor mechanic.