ditto
this would actually be even more useful that ship templates, especially in mods that use lots of weapon variants. such as versions of weapons used on specific ships that differ from the standard issue.
could this also include a feature to make such variants of the same weapons appear as the same weapon in the loadout screen. for example if a ship uses Cyclops#short and another ship uses Cyclops, only one cyclops is shown in the loadout (instead of showing icons for both Cyclops and Cyclops#short). possibly by addind an $alias: ("Cyclops", "Cyclops#short"). so if you try to arm a ship that can only take Cyclops#short with a cyclops, it will check the alias list and if a string in it matches the current banks loadout options, will arm that ship with that particular weapon. if a weapon appears in the aliased list it need not be in the mission's loadout option, it would be assumed to be a Cyclops and and the number of cyclops available will be decreased. if alternate versions appear in the team loadout then they would appear in the loadout list, so that current mods wont be broken.