That's what I meant by Pyhrric Victory: by firing these flux-intensive weapons at fighters, you lose even if you hit. If there is nothing else to fire at and you're at 0-flux, I get it, but the fighters are absolutely winning if the ship in question generates more flux trying to kill them than the fighters' weapons themselves. At best, firing these big guns are grossly inefficient when they hit. At worst, you're dumping huge flux/shot and hitting nothing
It's a very complicated question actually. It doesn't need to be a 0-flux game to be worth it. It depends on the fighter, the weapon in question, and how much flux you're generating right now versus flux dissipation. If the fighters are all on one side of your ship, then only half your guns are firing. A broadside ships exploit this fact. Also, if only PD weapons are firing, generally you are nowhere near hitting your dissipation rate.
Take a 4400 flux Hammerhead, turn off all weapons fire, raise shields and sit there. Send 2 wings of broadswords at it from a Condor. It'll overload in about 3 seconds from when the Broadswords start firing. Just tested in sim. On paper a single broadsword deals 156 kinetic damage per second, or 312 shield damage per second. I vaguely remember fighter machine guns firing half as often than ship ones or the like. Anyways, 4400 flux/0.8 efficiency/6 fighters/3 seconds = 305 shield damage per second per fighter. Seems to check out roughly. So we have a rough estimate of the DPS of a single Broadsword (which I suppose means dual Broadsword Condors with Harpoons should be kinda scary - 936 kinetic damage per second at long range, flux free followed up by HE missiles).
Unskilled heavy blasters require 2 projectiles to connect to completely kill a broadsword. It is worth it to kill a broadsword if they hit both hit, and it would have lived for 4.6 seconds longer otherwise (1440/312) assuming your shield is 1.0 efficient
and you're already using up all your flux dissipation. On the other hand, most ships do not reach their flux dissipation only firing their PD weapons, so 1440/312 isn't the right thing to compare. Its flux above dissipation. If your spare dissipation is, hypothetically, 800 (after shields and all other weapons), then the comparison is 640/312 = 2.05 seconds.
Take a shrike. Lets say it has a Heavy Blaster, 4 PD Lasers, Sabot Pod, and 610 flux dissipation (a player design), weapons adds up to 880, and shield is another 105, so 985 max builldup versus 610 dissipation.
A wing of broadswords come in. 4 PD lasers deal 300 energy damage per second, at a cost of 160 flux per second. Shield costs 105 flux per second. So without firing the Heavy Blaster, you're sitting at -345 flux per second. The broadswords are dealing 936 klinetic damage, or 1310 shield damage (including the 0.7 modifier) per second. With 8200 flux capacity, it'll last 6.2 seconds or so with shields up.
Now, the Broadsword flares basically mean the PD lasers are useless for about 6 seconds. The heavy blaster on the other hand, isn't distracted and will shoot at fighters. Lets say half the heavy blaster shots hit. So you're spending 1,500 extra flux (720*4-345*4) to kill a broadsword in 4 seconds. If that broadsword would have lived for another 6.9 seconds, it was worth it. Or the other way to put it, if it buys you a 6.9 second reprieve from a fighter (i.e. rebuild time and fly back out to you is 6.9 seconds or longer), and you've got 50% accuracy, you should be firing that Heavy blaster. Given Broadswords take 10 seconds to replace, the answer is always yes (assuming that 50% hit rate). For this particular ship against Broadswords. Which is not a 0-flux balanced ship.
), the AI shouldn't be autofiring high-flux weapons to that degree. If it is, it's a problem, but solving it by making drastic changes to how the AI uses a large fraction of weapons ... doesn't seem like the right move.