Currently, ships have a maximum range on weapons, after which you can't hit anything, and that range isn't very far. What is the plan for longer range engagements? Particularly, will we get the ability for larger capital ships to perform orbital bombardment on planets?

Weapons have a range. At the moment, it's just a simple function of velocity times the lifetime of the projectile; that gives you that maximum range. They're a couple of thousand meters at the moment from the size range we have in game. That's going to change as bigger and bigger ships come online and we mold the balance around them as they come in. Whether that's going to be orbital bombardment... It depends on the thing you're bombarding. It could be a very small planet, it could be a very big one, it could have one kilometer of atmosphere, it could have 10,000. It's hard to say, but those larger weapons will be able to reach significantly further than the weapons in the game currently can.

So as far as the orbital bombardment goes, it's a matter of the situation. What capital ship are we talking about? What's the size of the planet? How far are you from that planet? What's the status of that planet's atmosphere?

You can currently lob torpedoes down from quite high in the atmosphere of planets onto unsuspecting targets on the ground. In case you're wondering what your Retaliator's for.