Up to a certain point, the combat and the rendering engine actually breaks down in the old system if you increase the sector sizes too high. You're basically fighting with an enemy's nav marker, not their actual ship, and combat is limited to missiles. Missiles, missiles, missiles. Nothing but missiles. On GenXnova, 100% Beam+Beam didn't even render the beams because the range was too long. The ships aren't even drawn at that distance. I agree, having two 1000-meter-long uberdreadnought titans duking it out with a max weapon range of 4km looks very silly. You have this giant spinal-mount gun that only goes four times the length of the ship, I mean, come on. But many servers also have block limits that limit you to a 100 to 300 meter cruiser maximum, and a shorter weapon range isn't too bad with those.
It'd be interesting if range scaled with damage, so small bombers have to get closer and find gaps in the enemy's defenses to unleash their weapon payload, but big titans aren't gimped with spinal guns and turrets that only go a few times the length of the ship. Like, have it set up so that the server config file can have range as a sliding scale between a minimum figure and a maximum figure, and there's a curve where it starts off easier and then gets exponentially harder to squeeze more range out of a weapon by increasing damage. Like, maybe set the minimum to 4km and max to 8km on a server with 10km sectors, and have it so that typical fighter weapons and corvette weapons can easily reach out to 4 to 5 kilometers, but a missile boat with some big-ass missiles can go 6 to 7km, etc.
In "realistic" space combat, all the weapons would have infinite range pretty much, because once you accelerate something in space, it doesn't stop unless something makes it stop. There's no wind resistance, nothing to slow it down. The reason why weapons have range in Starmade is because of engine limitations and gameplay balance reasons. Players don't like having to shoot at one-pixel specks hundreds of kilometers away, even if "real" space combat would have them shooting at things they couldn't even see with the naked eye. If we had real-world combat spacecraft, it wouldn't be out of the question to launch a missile at a target from a good 10,000 to even 100,000 kilometers away. It would simply accelerate at insane, unsurvivable G-forces (being unmanned, obviously), coast to the target for maybe ten minutes to half an hour, and use small maneuvering thrusters for terminal guidance. Starmade's galaxies aren't even big enough to represent the insane scale that real-world interplanetary space combat would take place on. Even the combat in The Expanse, which is about as realistic a space opera as I've seen in recent years, is the space equivalent of a coked-up knife fight.
A lot of the newer changes to the game's systems are kind of bewildering. However, I think I'm up to the challenge, and I'm very curious to see what I can do under the new system. I think the devs have worked pretty hard on this and given it a lot of thought, and the new damage model creates interesting opportunities. I think a strong loadout for an assault frigate would be to pair heavy armor-piercing cannons with smaller "shredder" volley guns that take advantage of the new volley fire system to help keep the energy consumption manageable under rapid fire. If the AP goes all the way through a lightly-armored target, switch to the shredders and rip them up.
The ability to set turrets to volley fire could be used to make "flak cannons" that run through multiple barrels in a ripple-fire sequence, or missile turrets that launch relentless salvos that strike one after another. I'm really excited for that.
