From a purely mechanical standpoint Kinetic weapons are trash. I've seen a dev post stating they'll get a buff. I really think they should get a damage bonus vs. shields. 50% probably. Here's some info:
(DPT is damage per time from game tooltip, which factors accuracy but not enemy ship evade, though since evade would affect all your weapons [except missiles/torpedoes] I'm not sure it matters here -- Cost is power cost)
There are a lot of balance issues here. For example Torpedoes do more damage than missiles across the board and ignore shields. So...why would you use missiles? The swarmer missiles aren't listed but that "overwhelm point defense" stuff seems like nonsense to me.
Plasma Cannon vs. Stormfire Auto cannon: For one the Autocannon has half the range but in the un-modded game range can end up meaning bupkis because it all turns into a giant bowl of soup as the ships just molest each other. More importantly with the Plasma's 100% armor pen if a ship has just 9.29% armor (A base Destroyer with no added armor has 9%, Cruisers and Battleships have more) then the Plasma is doing more damage. So it's easy to see that Kinetic weapons have no place at all in the game....except the Autocannons sure are fun to watch.
In fact Plasma weapons are basically *the* weapons in the game until you get the high end stuff. Until you start talking about accuracy and evade. If the enemy fleet is all Cruisers and Battleships then you can probably just roll with the numbers here but as most people know right now the Fleet to Beat is All Corvettes Evading All The Time. This makes Torpedoes great but of course they can get point defensed so you just have to throw tons and tons of them to get through. Your hit ratio might end up looking pretty bad, but at least the enemy fleet had to spend on all that point defense instead of more plasma cannons right?
In the end the only weapons worth talking about are Torpedoes and Plasma weapons. Lasers, Disruptors, Kinetics...all trailing behind. Missiles trailing too, maybe just not as far.
P.S. How shitty are those Debris-only weapons right? Four of them are worse than the starter red laser. The Mining Drone Laser is the only weapon from Debris that's even remotely worth trying to use. The rest are utter failures.
P.P.S. It's not on the table but the Lightning weapons have a damage range of like 1-172/195. Yes. One. So while their average damage is fine....that's some unreliable weaponry you got there. They are at least 100% accuracy.
P.P.S. I am aware there are some weapons missing but I guess they're vaguely spoilery...not that it's a huge deal but I just left them off.
Edit: Updated the table with more weapons.