Aurora can be a good player ship to kill both smaller and larger ships. The trick I find, is rather counterintuitively to ignore its capacity to mount missiles. Safety overides and mount the fixed small mounts with Antimatter blasters. Leave empty the rearmost fixed small mount for range optimisation. The three foremost medium mounts can be Heavy Blaster, Mining Laser, or more antimatter mounts. The problem is as always, phase ships are always better player ships. As a fleet ship, Aurora is mostly useful because it can move quickly away from danger and so is less likely to be outmatched, but doesn't seem worth the 30 DP. So much of its usefulness is in its speed and Plasma jets. If you wanted to ward off frigates rather than kill them, the Eagle would probably be a better choice.
As a side not, it's also a bit of a shame but the AI "stock" Aurora variants seem to be poorly optimised.
The Medusa is ok in my opinion. A basic Medusa with 2 Pulse Lasers, 4 LR PD Laser and 2 Dual Autocannons beats a sim balanced Hammerhead. Which as it is 12 DP vs 10 DP is as expected.
Oddly enough against the sim Support Hammerhead it simply forever skirts on the edge of the range of the elite medium ballistic guns at range 1400 forever getting shot at, even with eliminate order. It doesn't know how to phase in and out of range it seems. Oddly enough giving Medusa Railguns instead of Dual Autocannon on eliminate, it behaves as expected and dives in and retreat.
As it is I think if the Medusa had 120 speed it would be much better in style. Perhaps with synergy mounts instead.
Sabot Aurora is good under player control, but AI could not overpower a lone Eagle (and eventually died).
I just run simulation a fleet, sub-optimised frigate hunter, Aurora (3 pulse lasers, 1 heavy Blaster, 5 IR Pulse Laser, ITU, IPDAI, IEA, SS, 19 capacitors 34 vents) vs the sim Eagle and it killed the sim Eagle with ease. It didn't even use most of its weapons.
Why bring a Aurora when you can deploy 3 Atlas MkII's!
Because you cannot? 1 Aurora is 30 Deployment Points and 3 Atlas MkII is 72 Deployment Points. You can deploy 2.4 Auroras for 3 Atlas MkII. It's like asking why bring a Dominator when you can deploy a Paragon.
A truly overpriced ship is the Buffalo Mk.II which is so bad I would prefer the Cerberus a combat freighter for the same Deployment Points. The fact that it has so mnay missile mounts that it can contribute to missile spam really overvalued its DP. The Atlas Mk.II is also overpriced. For 24 DP, a Dominator would generally be better. I suppose the Accelerated Ammo Feeder can do a suprising amount of burst damage though.