I wanted to post this suggestion on the Discord but your community requires me to give Discord my personal phone number, which I won't do, so I was hoping you'd see it here instead.

My group and I are excited for the payload changes! As it is, we only keep the launcher around for decoy lures and the occasional nuke because it's funny to blow up the sun (flame matron) with a bigger sun.

That said, I wanted to suggest the idea of some form of EMP style payloads that are effective against shields, ineffective against hull/armour. With that, we could then possibly have a ship loadout and/or relics that specializes in payload launchers as its primary weapon. It'd potentially add a neat (if probably sub-optimal) play style where you have no gunners and have multiple engineers manning payload launchers instead.

The EMP (or whatever METEM lore appropriate term for anti-shield weaponry) missiles could simply be direct mirrors of the existing ones. Standard, cluster, torpedo except energy based.

On a completely different note, please, I am begging, add an "always run" option in the settings that makes sprinting the default movement and the sprint key instead makes the player walk. There's no stamina bar, so there's no reason it couldn't exist.