The direction a ship faces (from the player's point of view, anyway) is more precise than the direction weapons fire. It's fairly easy to see if you zoom in and rotate your ship very slowly while firing a string of shots. This makes it unreasonably hard to hit targets from a distance, especially when firing railguns at a small ship like a Centurion. It's even worse shooting at a small drone like an observer or seeker. Hitting a Biocom mine from a safe distance is nearly impossible (I've tried).

We do this on purpose. We quantize the orientations of the ship, to reduce the amount of traffic needed to send over the network. Then on the client, we interpolate between the quantized values, so it still appears smooth. This has always been an issue with hitting objects at long range.

I can probably solve this (I think) with a new weapon type, that's like a railgun, but actually is (internal to the game) more like a homing missile that only homes a very tiny amount (the degree of quantization at expected range, roughly). This would let people hit far-away objects, without having to increase the total amount of traffic sent over the network.

But, like a lot of ideas and projects relating to this game, it remains unfinished and untested.

That's an interesting solution, and would probably solve the problem for rails. Hitting a Biocom mine with normal energy guns is a bit of an edge case, but it does exist. It's also a problem using capship turrets due to their extreme range.