The purpose of this suggestion is to help alleviate the problem of wasted overkill, while simultaneously giving the player more interesting choices for ship design.



Fire Control Batteries are components installed into ships and allow for firing on multiple targets. They can be thought of as a turret system.



In terms of game play, you could install as many as you like, breaking your weapons into smaller and smaller groups. Weapons are placed inside Fire Control groups during ship design, and can only be altered by retrofit.



But each Fire Control System takes up the space, production cost and research that could otherwise be occupied by weapons. If cost is too high though, small dedicated ships will continue to be optimal. There must be benefits of amortizing the costs of shared components in a larger hull to warrant a larger hull.



During combat, the ship effectively becomes multiple smaller ships for fire distribution, alleviating wasted overkill. Target selection process would be similar to the way it works currently, which I can only guess has to do with estimated firepower to destroy a ship.

Moved to proposals, added a little comment on the title.