I use 5 Glimmers with integrated gamma cores with integrated
Hardened shields, ITU, and front shield conversion
front shield conversion actually makes the ai stay alive for way longer lol and they count towards the officer limit meaning you can deploy a lot more when fighting enemy remnants
I would've probably Integrated Unstable Injector instead of Front Shields, to make sure the Glimmers are as hard to catch (without using Safety Overrides) as possible.
I personally played with 6 Gamma core Glimmers which were 24 skills in total since I integrated all of them into their respective ship, it's the best I could do since I was a good deal over the 240DP limit. Do 5 glimmers all with beta cores stay above the 42% CR malfunction treshold? How many Betas can you fully integrate before that starts happening, provided you stay at or under 240 combat ship deployment points in total?
To @AcaMentisIntroducing D variants of Remnant ships using unorthodox weapon loadouts would be something I'd love to see Vanilla do, despite remnants as a faction needing love in many other places which would come first.
As for the Autopulse vs Plasma discussion, you are correct.
The Autopulse is a good weapon that's easy to fit and to keep going. It's more or less a large energy weapon version of the IR Pulse Laser but with comparatively lower DPS and a large amount of stacked charges.
A single emptied out Autopulse only requires 250 flux per second to fire but it's good damage to flux ratio makes it quite decent if stacked or supported by weapons able to exploit the hard flux buildup, which is what the "Autopulser" Radiant Variant does, coupling 4 Autopulse Lasers buffed extended magazines with a single Tachyon Lance.
The plasma on the other hand is the single most DPS intensive weapon in the game if we take large weapon mounts with limited ammunition out of the equation.
It's got terrifying damage per shot, the projectiles just
CHAD their way through litterally every other piece of destroyable ordnance in the game and it can more or less do everything, from pressuring shields to deleting hull.
The predictable downside is the Flux requirements, which incidentally are also what makes having just two of them so good on the Radiant. A single Plasma Cannon consumes 825 flux per second to fire, which is more than 3 emptied out Autopulses generate (750). Having two at the front hardpoints guarantees the Radiant amazing DPS while also keeping the other 3 large mounts and the 4 mediums still empty and available for you to install litterally everything else.
Having Autopulses will most of the time ensure the Radiant always stays cool on flux (unless you have more than 3 with expanded mags) which will render it very capable of sticking to the enemy and keep using its missile weaponry.
Using just two Plasma Cannons at the front hardpoints will on the bother hand inevitably have the Radiant go up to 90% flux or more no matter what you do, since the Fearless AI has the same tendency to abuse everything you give it access to like the psychotic toddler it is