The rules on Weapons Upgrade lists the Silhouette limits for various weapons. Do these limits also apply to weapons that are part of the ship's standard weapons fit?

I ask because certain ships in the book seem to violate these limits. The CR-90 corvette (Sil 5) mounts Medium Turbolasers which is listed as Sil 6+ and the Citadel-class light freighter (Sil 4) mounts a Medium Tractor Beam which is listed as Sil 5+. There are other such examples in the AoR Beta too.

They may only apply in terms of hard point customization beyond the "stock" configuration of a given ship. The CR-90's medium turbo lasers are likely the only ones they can mount, and are specially configured for the vessel itself. In theory you could remove these weapons, freeing up some additional hard points, but given that you couldn't then add a larger weapon, why would you? In this case, there's likely a difference between the additional hard points on a vessel and the actual base weaponry that a vessel is made with. While I do realize there are inconsistencies in the capital ship rules, I doesn't really have an issue with this.

Going by the ship construction/modification systems in prior Star Wars RPGs (specifically d20), I'd say the Silhouette limit is only for adding weapons that are not standard to the ship design.

There was a discussion/argument about this over on the GSA when I posted my take on the YZ-775, for which I'd given light turbolasers, which per the attachment section requires the ship to be Silhouette 5. Based on my bit of work for WotC for Saga Edition (namely Unknown Regions sourcebook) as well as comments from Rodney Thompson (lead designer for the product line) and Sterling Hershey, when working up stats for pre-existing ships, the rules that players have to use when building or modifying their own ships get thrown out the window. Saga Edition was loaded with stock ship designs that didn't even pretend to follow the starship design rules presented in Starships of the Galaxy... because they were never meant to. Given the huge amount of variation in ship designs, it'd be an overly complicated task to design a starship creation system that would cover all those variations, and said system would itself be overly complicated, far more than what Chris Perkins and Rodney Thompson wanted for the Saga Edition product line, which was trying to step away from the excess complications that OCR/RCR had due to those products being little more than "D&D 3.X in Space."

For a real world example, consider the A-10 Thunderbolt, which was pretty much built around it's primary weapon. There'd be no way you could just strap something like that onto an aircraft of similar size and expect it to fly, and yet the A-10 is a combat-proven craft that does its assigned job quite effectively. That would be a case of a "too large" weapon being mounted in a vessel that's designed specifically for that weapon. Though to be fair, the A-10 in Star Wars would be more akin to mounting a light turbolaser in a Silhouette 3 starship. Talk about a nasty surprise for the other guy.

Dono: I remember that discussion, I apologise for being a bastard about it.

And yes, I'd say as the others that the silhouette limitations are for attachments only, not stock made ships.

Although I am toying with a home-brew attachment idea for adding oversized weapons onto smaller ships...