Well, kinda. For some reason, it have more priority than a reloading, so it happens first and moves reloading to the next step.

We have looked into this, but it's not a trivial problem. I'll try to explain.

The current mechanic of shutting down modules when the target dies has been implemented on player request. Previously, active modules didn't stop immediately when the target died and they could be "chained" between targets, which could cause a lot of nasty situations, including friendly fire in PvP.

Normally it wouldn't be a big issue, the problems come when you change your primary target in the middle of the reload cycle. In this case we can't really decide what the module should do, stop because your previous target died, or continue because you want to shoot the new one. It's the decision between interrupting everything, or having an extra cooldown cycle, or letting modules chain to the new target.

We could make the module shutdown command delay until the reload process is finished, but this would require a dirty hack which would likely break something else, so we're not sure we want to risk it to fix such a rare problem.

My advice in a situation like this would be to reload manually before you start to shoot another target.

Sorry I don't really know what you're talking about.

Weapon shoots, target dies, cooldown ends, end of story. This cooldown is obviously needed because otherwise a module would not have a cycletime, and you could use it prematurely on another target.

But after a bit of testing I do not see an "artificial extra cycle", whatever that may be.

This is exactly what's happening.

*edit: ok I see what the confusion might be. When I say module cycle is "interrupted" it means a command is sent to stop the module and end the cycle in a cooldown. The problem is that this command is also sent when the module is in the middle of a reload cycle, so reload -> target dies -> stop module -> cooldown -> reload didn't finish so please try reload again. Solving this would require that dirty hack I wrote.

found the other anoying situation where that "cooldown" cycle happens: harvesting and mining.

thats what i do most nowadays - so plants dieing or tile empty results in error message and an empty cycle.

If we are talking about plants, I'd like to have auto-stop on cargo full for harvesters, but that's an op.

Thing is that it's not that easy t manually reload especially when yu're shoting lots of targets - it's hard to be concentrated on ammo counter mostly. Well, how about guns don't have auto-reloading at all? Much easier t reload them manually when they stopped shooting. other solution can be to separate weapon cycles and reloading cycles somehow, but I don't really knw if that's possible in current mechanics.