I feel like comparing a 1v1 "white room" fight of Aurora with it kiting at 1k+range forever vs anything is ...unrealistic.
How long would that even take to do, slowly beaming it to death? Especially if 25 or 50% of the damage is Frag, which does even less versus a shield (50% of a Tac Laser's 75 DPS converted to Frag is a total of 9.38 "hard" damage/second to a shield...and armor.). Eventually the other cruiser will just vent for like 8s and your 3 minutes of beam-retreating will be back to nothing, no? What kind of loadout are we working with here, and what actually would its effective DPS be?
All this also assumes the fight has nothing else going on (say, the rest of your fleets) which doesn't really happen outside the sim fights, or peak operating time concerns.
Saying that, I could still see it ending up being boring and some people might feel compelled to try it anyways (
), but so can a lot of things if you stretch hard enough in your imagination.
HSA draining your engines to kick your speed off/down (say, redirecting power to guns to hard-fluxify it or...high-tech mumbo jumbo) is an interesting way to avoid much of that though, and has obvious trade-offs in play so might prove interesting to engage with (what's it do to laser PD?).
Also must keep in mind that if if HSA were to not lower range it'd mean the long-range Beams lose potential interactions with Energy Weapon Mastery which is...not optimal, though I suspect most people just try to maximize range anyways?