Why did my weapon recharge bars get cut in half?
Solution 1:
The length of the recharge bars scale; the weapon with the longest recharge gets the full length in the UI while all others are scaled down relative to it. This doesn't change any of the actual recharge times, just their representation in the UI. If a weapon has half the recharge compared to another weapon, it gets half the recharge bar.
So if you loot a new weapon with a much higher recharge than all of your current weapons, and your ship has an empty weapon slot, the new weapon is automatically equipped and your recharge bars get scaled accordingly.