My thought is that is not enough vents and capacitors for AIs. They are not players and plan their vents and capacitor usage, they are reactive users.
Having low venting meaning they often will end up not shooting and sitting there with shields up.
Having low capacitors means they will get easily overloaded by deciding to shield tank stuff like LMG and autocannon shots.
Atlest 7-8 capacitors are needed to prevent lashers from instea gibbed from getting hit by a kenitic volly from destoryers and above.
Atlest 5 vents are needed so they can shoot without baisically getting themself overloaded within a second and various disaters happening.
True enough, but the only design here that doesn't have passive dissipation exceed shield maintenance plus all weapons is the Buffalo-2. And that one doesn't have a shield to worry about.
Putting the Lasher-L-Assault into the simulator, it won 2 out of 3 matches one-on-one against both the Lasher-CS and the Lasher-Standard. A fourth match against the Lasher-Standard got aborted after the Lasher-L-Assault decided to reverse into a map corner... not because the enemy was pressing it, but just because.
To acoomadate for this I can say you can drop the missles and magazine mods.
If, as with the existing Luddic Path variants, SO gets moved to a permanent hullmod (and I thus didn't have to spend OP on it), then those 15 OP I assigned to SO can easily be reallocated to capacitors and vents. But I think being able to easily overload a shielded Luddic Path ship is a good thing.
They are made for long engagements that 1. low tech ships are not made for, and 2. goes aginst the doctrine of ludd and hegenomy.
Given the low ammo counts and high refire rates on most small missiles, I disagree. In these cases, it's less "long engagement" and more "bigger punch".
Your Bralwer-L assualt is a underuse of the Brawler class frigates. Brawlers are designed as fire support as they carry alot of weapon mounts with acclerated ammo, as the flaw is the terrible shield coverage. With an unstable injector its going to act as a comical relief ship as it will gurantee to be a spinning wreck flying off into space right at the start of the battle.
Also Brawlers themselves are expensive and rare enough that they should have better weaponry.
It's supposed to be "thematic", not necessarily "powerful". I did start running it through simulations, and it seems that the Thumper underperforms even more than I thought it did, so I swapped out the Hammers for LMGs and lost the Unstable Injector to pay for it. That got it winning, hopefully not by too much.
If you want a light assult Brawler capable in AI hands I suggest:
1x Heavy machine gun, 1x Chain assault gun. SO, Automated repair, and durable engine assembly.
That's too powerful, it'll eat players all day every day.
If you want a more "primitive design"
How about a Cerberus with a chain assult gun and a dual light autocannon in the front.
Feel free to spec it out.
Baisically, I want to warn you putting Unstable injector on AI ships, as they are nutoriously bad at keeping their engines out of harms way that once they burn out, they are dead, espechially friagates. (as they cannot keep formation and distance, allowing maximise shield arc protection and limiting firing options on them)
I wanted speed and more speed on them, so it's either Unstable Injector or Augmented Engines - and Augmented Engines would increase the burn speed and make the fleet harder to avoid. If that makes their engines a weak spot, so much the better.
Also on your Luddic Path hullmods. The Ludds are well known to be food producers and supporting large populations, so people might be a cheaper resource then ships.
So how about we reverse that Reduce crew to something similar to :
Increase minimum crew required, increase hull and armor values (better maintain work cuz more people), also no flux increase as that is TECH STUFF, AND TECH STUFF IS BLASHPEMY. Also crew accomidation on ships are increased as you know, they might get along better with one and other and you can fit more people without problems arising. Also faster weapon and engine repairs, cuz also, more people.
Luddic CHURCH is about the rural, ascetic lifestyle. Luddic PATH is the destroy-all-technology type. I don't see Luddic Path fanatics as being interested in such fripperies as "showers", "medical stations", or "additional bunks", not when they can fill the space with more HOLY EXPLOSIVES.