Infrared, in your initial comment, you said:

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Current behavior: When tux shoots a ranged weapon with a high ROF (rate 
of fire), the entire attack animation (point gun, shoot gun, return to 
standing position) is played repeatedly and greatly sped up. Looks 
weird. Good example: Laser pulse rifle.

Expected/wanted behavior: When tux shoots such a weapon, the few frames 
in which the gun is actually shot, say frames 5-8, should loop or 
'ping-pong' (played normally, then backwards, then normally again, then...)

Possibly this can be applied to any weapon with a Recharge time smaller 
than some value defined in item_archtypes.
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I'm starting working on it, and would like to have some more precisions.

So I will add a shoot_first_keyframe and shoot_last_keyframe to Tux
animation definition.

I will also add a loop_shoot_animation_rate in the Tux rendering config.
If a weapon RoF is higher, the shoot animation will be played in a loop,
as you want (if think that there is the same kind of issue with the
knife, iirc).

But what about the Recharge Time ? I do not really understand how it is
related....

(And please, register to the new bug tracker: bugs.freedroid.org)