I remember seeing the refresh rate mentioned elsewhere, with someone claiming that this doesn't actually limit fire rates, and guns which should fire multiple shots in one tick do in fact fire multiple shots for one tick in the form of an instant burst with distance-of-flight adjustments. On the other hand, I seem to possibly recall someone else may or may not have specifically replied that this not the case.

Sadly, based on my own testing just now with various mostly-vanilla weapons with reload times from > 20 ms to < 5 ms (and some < 0.2 ms with 80-260 shots before overheat), the game does not appear to allow more than one shot per tick. All weapons fired about 30 shots per second, and they all (simultaneously) fired exactly the same number of shots in the same time aside from overheat, so it's not just lag slowing things down. This apparently includes multi-barrel weapons - per turret, not per barrel - which largely defeats the point, and also blast launchers.

Because the game engine has a refresh rate of 30 Hz, effectively capping weapon's reload time at 33.3 ms. All that increasing the loader power consumption any further would achieve is an increase of loader's mass.

Why the loader speed change for this weapon? There is no capacitor, so recharge time should not logically be an issue, and the original loader power (unlike some others) wasn't super high compared to the weapon to begin with.