Next the light scatter cannon. The idea is nice but the dmg is too low. It takes a long time to kill anything. Even when installed in mass on the bullmastiff, torpedoes and missiles are landing almost unscathed.
It performs above average for the OP as a small PD I'd say, has good range for PD plus it is not single target PD as far as I can remember, AOE + chance to chain to next target if I am not mistaken. I really like the light scatter cannon. So, I strongly disagree with buffing it, imo it is more than fine the way it is, inb4 nerf 
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It absolutely needs point defense hullmod to be good. Otherwise it is best used as hull breaker rather than pd.
I'm glad this is still being worked on. It's always been a weird ship pack that doesn't fit anywhere, yet has some of the most ambitious and weird ideas; I love it.
My only wish is that the Newfoundland functioned better in combat. I'd love for it to twist like a snake instead of like a stick bending slightly. Perhaps if the compartments could be spaced further apart and 'bump' forward and back a little. It just feels too rigid, making it a bit unpleasant. Changing full steam ahead to forcing you to max speed, while providing every compartment with damage resistance and flux dissipation could be incredibly neat, letting you do drive by's or plow through enemy lines. As it is, it's not a ship I think anyone realistically brings.
The Carolina still sounds gross enough for me to never run it. The sound effect seems like a slightly distorted actual revolver, which is somewhat unpleasant to the ears and stands out compared to every other weapon in Starsector, modded or otherwise. If some alternative could be looked into? Make it a bit sexier?
Edit
I strongly suggest taking Warnoise's suggestions with a bit of salt. The Shield Breaker is extremely broken when combined with many other popular mods. I think expecting anyone to run EdShipyards and nothing else is being silly. Hullmods like Split Chamber and certain ships (Predator X) make obscene use of the shield breaker weapons, especially any ship that has the speed to cycle engage. I'd say they're outright OP, but only when combined with other mods.
Which is sort of my experience with ED Shipyards. Maybe the weapons are all perfectly balanced with Vanilla, but with my 40+ mods, Ed Shipyard weapons consistently seem capable of being abused over any other modded arsenal. I would strongly be wary of making Shield Breaker weapons even better than they are.
"the weapon when combined with a CERTAIN modded hullmod on a CERTAIN modded ship becomes broken so it's balanced!1!1!1"
What kind of logic is this lol
I played a playthrough using only ED ships while playing around with ED weapons. I don't know what broken mods you playing with so if you gonna speak balance compare the weapon to its vanilla counterparts rather than other op mods or some crap. What you saying applies to almost every weapon in the game (op or not) so let's not open that can of worms.
That being said, the shieldbrealer is a 450 range weapon that needs 20 op. I tried it with extended magazine because otherwise the ammo runs out way too quickly. So count around 30 op on a capital to use this weapon. I tried it on the bullmastiff because it has the means to get close pretty quickly. You not only have to be literally at point blank range to do full damage with it, you also have to hit a capital ship or something to do full damage because the scatter is so huge that most of the bullets don't hit the target. Its performance was extremely lackluster in a late game battle against remnants.
In the end I ditched that weapon and went for storm needler instead. In close quarters I need a weapon that put constant pressure on the shield to not let the target shield tank missiles and armor shred weapon, not a weapon that runs out of ammo in the middle of the engagement while being right close to the enemy.
Kadur ships aren't really built to fight vs Ordo fleets (ordos can phase out and outmanuever most of kadur's ship system) but otherwise Kadur carriers have some success as opposed to Ordo carriers.