Why were magazine sizes reduced so much for ballistic weapons in 3.14?

That is mostly down to the role we want to see in ballistics. I mean, the purpose of ballistics was always to feel limited but powerful. And in 3.13, we didn't really have that. Ballistics were practically just cannons which looked and sounded a bit different compared to laser weapons or energy weapons. I mean, they had fire times of several minutes. And it comes back to the thing that David said before: we want to give these things purpose. And the specific issue that we had in 3.14 was the length of a continuous fire stream which you could put out, which was always much more powerful than the energy cannons, which had natural fire pauses because they needed to regenerate. But that offset was very, very large still. And even when we equalized the DPS outputs of energy repeaters versus ballistic weapons just to see how they would perform, the ballistics were still a lot, lot more powerful because they could keep up this weapon stream. And at the moment we do not have any other ways to force a break in that fire pattern. So for that reason we harshly limited the ammo and also upped the damage quite a lot to force players to make very conscious choices about when to employ those weapons.

Sorry, there's one extra point I forgot to mention about ballistics, which maybe we shouldn't go into too much detail on, but Mark mentioned the physicalized damage. When that comes along, ballistics' roles will change. And obviously certain ships that have very high armor will then be much more resilient to ballistics than they are now, right?

So there's more work we want to do on them to make them feel different in the future. But everything will make more sense once the physicalized armor system is in. But for now, we're happy in terms of where it brings us in terms of weapon versus ship balance.