I am concerned about the apparent unintended imbalance that exists in weapons in ES. Kinetic weapons are supposed to excel at short range and not at long range, for example--but it apparently turns out they are much deadlier even than missiles at long range. Stuff like that.



This leads me to wonder what mods people may have designed, if any, to correct this. Is such a mod possible? (I don't know what's moddable and what's not.)

Yep, it's easily possible. There are a couple of mods that nerf long range kinetics already actually. I think the devs intended to remove the balance where missiles are for long range, kinetic is for short, by putting in the LR/MR/M selection. In theory all the types were supposed to be roughly equivalent at each range selection, but due to the fact that kinetic fires 4 times per phase, they became dominant very quickly