Well, let me be the first to say I love the look of these weapons and agree with you 100% about how cool looking the vanilla laser rifle is. I was hoping for a mod like this. XCom is very Sci-Fi to me (fighting aliens and such), and I've always hated the vanilla heavy laser and laser pistol because they didn't match that sleek laser rifle at all, or each other for that matter.
[/rant]I also think the vanilla laser pistol and plasma pistol sprites got accidentally switched in development without anyone noticing. The plasma pistol is the one with the neat looking red triangle on it! That should've been the laser pistol, I think. The vanilla one looks alien and more plasma-y to me. And, gah! the lame khaki color of the vanilla heavy laser. Looks like a kid made it out of cardboard, and it shoots about as well too.[/endRant]
One thing I'd like to see is a different color shot for each weapon. There's a thread somewhere about recolored laser fire, and to heck with the lame (yet funny) yellow laser. I'd want the pistol to shoot green, the rifle to shoot blue and the heavy to shoot purple (to account for the shorter wavelengths of the more powerful lasers). I might try to figure out how to do that...
Also, you should put [WEAPON] [GRAPHICS] or something like that at the beginning of this thread title for convenience and stuff.