Aurora stuffed with missiles and Missile Racks have enough to kill several ships. Without missiles, Aurora needs to pound shields with inefficient weapons and needs to min-max flux stats (dissipation and capacity) and make shields as efficient as possible to have enough flux advantage to pound shields and have some left to attack armor/hull despite inefficiency. I tried various loadouts, and simply two heavy blasters in the turrets and nothing else (except PD in the smalls) is simple but effective, and player does not need to aim. (If I use pulse lasers in hardpoints, I need to spend more effort aiming them just to get slightly better performance in best-case.) It is choice between missiles or better flux and shields. Normally, I prefer no missiles and better guns, but Aurora is too short-ranged and plays too much like normal Shrike, which NEEDS Sabot pod if I want a hard-flux assault loadout. At 30 DP, Aurora is too annoying to use and I prefer to use a more powerful ship with less finesse requirements for a little more DP cost (like Doom at 35 DP or Conquest at 40 DP).
I am not fond of AI Aurora. If I use Steady, it cowers too much and gets picked off by anything that outranges it. I need either Aggressive officer or Aggressive fleet doctrine, which I generally do not want.
