It's difficult, if not impossible to balance a weapon, whose range is dependent on sector size for both vanilla settings and servers with larger sectors. Default beams only have 1km range, which I'd consider almost useless. They might be useful for very small and hard to hit targets, if AI wouldn't miss those intentionally. With a 5 times increased sector size beam range is 5km - at such ranges the hitscan ability becomes far more powerful.
However, it would be silly, if weapons had ranges, that allowed them to shoot into unloaded sectors. So the dependence on sector size makes sense. I suggest to keep x*sector size as upper limit for weapon ranges, but only in addition to numerical values, which are then <= x*sector size.
However, it would be silly, if weapons had ranges, that allowed them to shoot into unloaded sectors. So the dependence on sector size makes sense. I suggest to keep x*sector size as upper limit for weapon ranges, but only in addition to numerical values, which are then <= x*sector size.