Ive done a weapons analasys of SEIV GOLD demo edition.
You can find it
here
It only compares ship mounted direct fire weapons, and doesnt take into account special abilities, such as skipping shields or armour.
The tables show total research required to achieve a given weapons capability, and also shows effectivesness at range, where effectiveness=dammage/(size*reload).
Note that for many weapons there are overlaps in research points (e.g. physics research enables many kinds of weapons).
Im still waiting for my full Version of the game to be delivered, so this analasys doesnt cover the full tech tree, only the demo tech tree.
If someone would zip up and email me the contents of their 'Space Empires IV Gold\data' directory, I can run my analsys programs over that data and post it here.
[ 10 March 2002: Message edited by: damien ]