Most early mining/salvaging 'weapons' have lower range limits.
By the time you're onto Naonite and/or Trinium/Xanion, a lot of them start generating with increased ranges (usually 1.5-2km on the longer-range ones), and you can manufacture your own from Turret factory blueprints, and increase the amounts of certain components to improve their range.
You shouldn't really be ABLE to have a large enough ship to be struggling to manoeuvre, but also lack Mining/Salvaging 'weapons' with 1km+ range on them.
Also, that sounds exactly like you're using Mining/Salvaging turrets, and not R-Mining/R-salvaging ones (see in-game encyclopedia entry on the 'Raw-' 'weapons').
Game checks turret slots when placing them, not when using them, to avoid exactly the kind of scenario you bring up; Having to 'hot-swap' weapons.
I'd very much like a more 'soft limit' of 'active vs inactive turrets', but I understand why it's a 'hard limit', and checked when placing turrets, not 'live'/when 'enabling/disabling'.
Also, they do work in combat, my current Xanion R-Disassembler's have something like 1300DPS, but no damage to shields is the 'handicap' (other than requiring manual use, as they won't 'autofire' on active ships, hostile or not).
Even 'defensive' turrets contribute, obviously far less on an 'equal footing', but it can still be noticeable.
Transporter Block & Software.
To quote myself;
Most 'rare' Transporter Software gives you up to ~2km or so docking distance, more for higher quality levels.
That, I'll admit, irritates me, but it's usually a minor inconvenience. Would certainly prefer 'equal capability'/to sit still while charging.
Probably a few I can think of, the main two being Resources (reducing unnecessary calculations/projectile tracking) and Balance (who picks an energy weapon, when you can just throw on a Railgun and boost out to 40+km and ping away until it dies?).
Kind of a 'given' of space travel, honestly, other than some of the more 'arcade' space games.
Hell, even wrecks slowly grind to a halt, when they'd really just drift off into space otherwise.
