Artillery was a bad idea. It adds nothing to the game - no interesting or meaningful choices at all. It's just a hassle whose net effect is to avoid gameplay. And there's way too much of it in an area that supposedly was a thinly colonized frontier.
And having read through the settings file to figure out how to disable it, gratuitously insulting your users is about as low class as you can get. Don't do that.
artillery gives you the choice of either a) avoiding it to approach whatever you're trying to approach, which is easier than you seem to think it is, or b) disabling it by hacking the watch towers. if a fleet doesn't see you, which is probably the smarter way to invade literally anything, then you won't get shot. sounds simple, tbh
also, it's the author's mod. he's allowed to say you have weak bones for disabling something that he put time and effort into. i would do the same thing with my mods if i had anything that made the game actively harder.