I agree completely with Drooling Iguana. Theres not enough of a penalty balance for using the railgun. It seems more practical if firing a rail would take LARGE amounts of energy away. I think AT MOST with the largest battery, you should only be able to fire two railguns at the same time. This would really balance it out... since you cant just fire 4 rails.... then lay in with your heavy weapons... then fire 4 rails again.... etc. I think that their damage is just fine. I think this could simply be fixed by upping the power requirements for them by a ton. Maybe like 200 energy per shot or something. Seems practical for me for a sniper weapon. Or perhaps you could lower the max ammo for them.... like 4 per railgun. Iguana's idea still seems like the best one i've seen here. -edit - (you should probably drastically increase the cost of the railgun as well. Don't get me wrong... I don't want to make the railgun some weapon that nobody ever uses - I just don't want it to be the weapon that everybody has to use if they want to get any kills whatsoever) -edit-

I think the solution is not the 100e/shot that has been implemented, nor is the answer specialized mine/missile/gun ports.

The answer is to specialize the SHIPS. Take the railguns OUT of general circulation. You can only buy them as a package - a tri-rail vulture with 3k hull points. The ship has NO weapon ports and only a single cargo slot. ammo costs 100 each. The ship itself is only moderately priced at 8-12kc - between the ammo, engines and batt, it will be a monetary drain on all but the most effective of pilots. The ship does NOT come with ammo, and max ammo is 60 (20 shots if the rails are linked).

Basically, you have a flying gun with virtually no armor. This is a ship of SUPERIOR skill. It's useless for pirating, a money pit for players with bad aim, and serves an extremely specific purpose - taking down high armor ships.

This solves most of the problems. Even a bus could take it down if piloted well.