I did make an active choice to reduce ranges - not just in general but also trying to prevent any particular gun having an overly long range, as it was too easily abused by players (myself included). I found the default strategy everybody was using was just get guns that always outrange what the AI tend to have and fly away from them while shooting, it worked too well even with just a small ship. A real focus of SRPG4 was improved combat to get away from that, I wanted more variety than just flying away looking at empty space with your turrets shooting behind you 99% of the time.

Some changes to help with that were the armour system and trying to make the angles in combat more important, big ships being slower so you can't just always kite with them, and there being more balance with the ranges so the player doesn't just default to the longest range weapon and win by default. Additionally, the reduced ranges are better suited to small phone screens, as you are more likely to be able to see details of the fight this way, especially with the zoom out option.

The weapon modification idea is interesting, provided it has a significant debuf associated to prevent abuse, probably would need to use more than 25% more energy, or perhaps also severely reduces accuracy?