The Aether is a mostly peaceful place, however dangers still lurk around the vast emptiness of the void. Thus, ships occasionally carry weapons and small armaments in order to defend themselves against whatever threat that might befall them. For naval ships built for war, the weapons fielded are deadly and suited for strategies and tactics employed to fight in the zero to low gravity environment of the Aether.
Muskets and smoothbore barrels have long been replaced with rifles and bullet cartridges. While some far-flung settlements might still have a few old fashioned muskets lying around for home defense, the majority of modern weapons used are breech loading rifles, pump-action shotguns and revolvers, which are perfectly sufficient for keeping bandits off your asteroid yards and hunting the occasional jellyfish for quite a few decades now.
That isn’t to say innovation is not occurring within the arms industry, especially for the militaries of the various factions. The Solarians, being receptive to new technology and having less bureaucracy to cut through, quickly armed themselves with freshly minted lance rifles that fire a blazing fast bolt of Aetherium energy towards whoever dares encroach their clearly marked borders. Meanwhile the League struggles with complicated logistic chains and meters of red tape, but self-loading rifles are finally beginning to upend the old breech loaders used ever since the nation’s founding.