More weapon comments:
"Converted Heavy EMB" is not bad per se, but part of the reason to use ballistics (over energy) is long range and possibly specialized damage types when advantageous. Hellbore, HAG, and Mjolnir are already great weapons, and some of the Scy ships have good enough flux stats to make Storm Needler really shine. It takes something powerful or unique to displace the good standard ballistic options. For example, Heavy Kacc is Gauss Cannon's concentrated kinetic damage on a budget - great for overloading and paralyzing ships. Area Scorcher could theoretically be the ballistic's answer to Guardian PD (if it had PD tag), offering something none of the standard ballistics do. Ricohet and ORION are exotic weapons that may not be the best, but perform well enough to be useful for those who attempt trick shots. The only thing CHEMB might do is offer high burst damage on the cheap, but if you have enough anti-shield firepower, then stock HE weapons or Mjolnir are more effective.
Tried the hacking beam weapon. If the weapon could be judged only by its Codex stats, who in their right mind would use it? It offered some surprises. One, the beam does hard flux damage! Not much, but some. Two, if the beam connects, it seems to randomize the hit location (or spawn a secondary invisible attack on the target). Anything with less than 360 shields will take damage and/or suffer shutdowns. The only other weapon I have seen do this was the Raven missile from the (dead) Gedune faction mod. This weapon is effective against most frigates and some destroyers, and it offers passable PD. It is not that great against fighter wings or bigger ships. Overall, this weapon is not too bad, but I prefer the more versatile Vibrating Beam over this.
More ship comments:
Found a few more ships the game did not want to cough up when I first played Scy:
Megaera is like a ghost, and it feels like a mini-Hyperion. Only one fixed hardpoint, but given what it has, it can perform alright and not care much about no PD. It is a useful playership. Have not tested this under AI control.
Siren is novel, if not very powerful. It seems to be based around clever use of its main gun, rather than beating the enemy quickly.
Sthenos is Spartan - minimal but effective. Gauss Cannon, two Heavy Maulers, and your choice of small ballistic PD is simple yet brutally effective (at kiting, at least). Armored adds two more beamers, unarmored is a speed demon. As a playership, I prefer the unarmored version for its speed. (Armored version has too low burn speed to be practical.) It is one of the few Scy ships I would not mind integrating with my fleet of high-powered ships.
Khalkotauroi would be a fun ship to use, but its six fragile capacitors is too much of a weakness to tolerate when looking for powerful ships to use.
The rest of the cruisers seem okay, but nothing special.
One thing I forgot about the Nemean Lion battle fortress: lack of burn speed. I did not realize (at first) it had a base burn of 1. Combined with no Augmented Engines, it is very, very slow! I would not use this ship at all in the campaign unless an enemy fleet was right on top of my storage. It is fun to use in the simulator, though, just to see what it can do.
I tried Precision Gears on the Lamia some more, and while Gears lets the Lamia play a mean kiting game, slower fire rate means peak performance becomes a bigger problem. Lamia is not that bad of a ship, just not very fun to use for some reason (probably due to competition like Enforcer or Medusa).