expanding the post
well, in the t20, when u look at , say the seeker, the dton for the mining laser is taken out of the volume of the seeker. i looked at the sdb and same thing, the weapons tonnage is taken out of the dtonnage for these ships. for comparison, i have seen deck plans for the scout/courier, and they show the space/volume taken up by the hardpoint, or at least the access to it, which could be part of the 20 dton allocated for the bridge space. the hardpoint and turret don't take up space/volume, looks like they are considered part of the hull. i had thought the weight listed for the ships weapons was for cargo purposses in the speculative cargo list. but when you look at the seeker and sdb, the weight of the weapons is taken out of the total tonnage of the ships in question. now i had usually thought that the weight of the weapons was negligle to the ship, considered it part of the turret/hardpoint mechanism, and thus ignored it. the 2 ships i mentioned are built with the weapons as part of the original ship just out of the shipyards. the free trader has 2 hardpoints, and i think turrets (don't have book right at hand) but no weapons, so the weapons have to be added, and going by the other ships with weapons built in from the beginning, they take up volume. so i would 'assume' that if i want weapons in my free trader, i'm going to lose space somewhere, or upgrade the jump, maneuver, and power plant systems to compensate for the extra weight the added weapons will put on the ship. i'll probabley just ignore the weight in my MTU, but i was wondering about the official/cannon view on this, as this could be an interesting twist for the players when getting weapons for their ship, especially since they'll need more credits than just for the weapons, but for any upgrades or changes in the interior of the ships. part of my thinking was that the weapon systems took up more space than the hardpoint gives, power couplings, connections to the computer/sensors, cooling systems, etc... i hope this explains my original post better.