Randomness of loot drops is too random. Sounds crazy but hear me out. When I find a Human Gatling with 2 upgrades on hull damage floating in space its stats should be identical to the one that I purchased and upgraded with 2 upgrades on hull damage myself. Right now all weapons loot seem to have a random number generating its stats and upgrades. So you can have a heavily "upgraded" weapon with worse stats than an un-upgraded one of the same type purchased at the store. While this adds even more randomness to the game it also makes the game slower/longer and more frustrating as every time I get a weapon I have to carefully compare its stats to see if it is better or worse than my current ones. This also makes it much more difficult to balance the game as 80% of the gear is getting made up stats that could help or hurt the player.
Solution: all the races main weapons need set base stats that upgrade in identical ways. The randomness of the drops should simply be A) what weapon type with B) how many standard upgrades. Then a player can quickly see (for instance) "oh this is an 'unidentified ion cannon' with 2 upgrades on hull and 1 upgrade on accuracy - the one I have already has more upgrades so I'll sell this newly found one..." This also allows players to learn which weapons types they like for their style of play verses "well did that strategy work better because I used more lasers than gatlings or because the specific lasers I happened to find this game were better than they normally are..." This also makes future balancing easier because the devs have fewer variables to adjust.
Exceptions: Total random stats generation could be kept for the more rare items like death ray or repair beam as A) you rarely find multiples of these so comparing stats is minimized for the player and B) it seems more likely that such rare items would be produced more ad hoc manner rather than a mass produced standard short range human laser.
I think you could also institute a RARE loot drop of a "Modified" Weapon (or some other word such as "Rare" that is appended to the title to show it is unique). However such modifications should be better than the now standardized weapons types, as it wouldn't make sense to modify a weapon to make it worse. It would probably be a good idea to show the modified stat as a different color to further highlight its exceptional ability. E.g., a hyper range laser that has 2X the normal laser's range would have the word stat of range in green instead of blue in the ship display.
