Elite Dangerous has been patched to prevent rogue NPCs developing their own hybrid superweapons. To be clear, these weren't weapons they were crafting from recipes—the AI was building entirely new WMDs beyond the scope of Elite's weapon tables.
"It appears that the unusual weapons attacks were caused by some form of networking issue which allowed the NPC AI to merge weapon stats and abilities," writes head of community Zac Antonaci, "meaning that all new and never before seen (sometimes devastating) weapons were created, such as a rail gun with the fire rate of a pulse laser."
The fix makes four changes to the AI:
Fix NPCs ending up with overpowered hybrid weapons
Stop NPCs deciding to attack if they only attack opposing powers and the player and AI powers are aligned to the same superpower
Slight rebalance of the ambient AI rank chances, should see slightly less of the top end and more of the low/mid range
Smooth out the mission-spawned USS AI levels so that high ranks are rarer and only elite missions hit the top end ai (though deadly can get close)
Details on the additional tweaks and fixes can be found on the Frontier forums.