I was going to respond with some huge point-by-point rebuttal of most of these points but I thought of a better idea.
OP, this thread has attracted a lot of attention from others within the community because of some (well, many) claims that are unorthodox. Clearly you and I are talking over each other and neither of us is going to be convinced by the manner of words.
As such, I would like to invite you to a community PVP AI Tourney
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to create a fleet composition with given rules and restrictions, and these fleets get thrust against each other in the field of battle until a victorious side emerges.
Most players outfit their ships more closely to what I describe (as such: far more fitting of various small slots onto warships). If Star Sector combat works far more closely to what you're saying, then your fleet compositions should have no issue defeating their fleet compositions.
If it's your fleet compositions that perform consistently well over the currently-known "conventional" community member compositions, I'll have no choice but to accept that your points are correct, such as that smalls are near-useless and high-tech ships are the true long-range doctrine, and that your suggestion of reducing all small weapons to 0-2 OP is valid.
Should you accept this invitation, you'll have considerable sway as the guest of honour on what precisely the ruleset and various restrictions on building ships and fleets will be, such that you feel that the Tournament experience is a fair one without "cheese" or "meme" compositions.
So, will you accept?
And what would the point be? Fighting a ship made to counter another ship instead of making a ship that works against all the ships in a single player game?
A 4 tachyon paragon can't duel for crap unless it has a very specific timid officer trolling all over the map in a 1v1 (or 1v3) scenario, if I wanted to cheese to get fake results against ships you'd never encounter in the sector I'd probably abuse something like autopulse and/or heavy plasmas for a very specific scenario, instead of having a great centerpiece capital flagship capable of erasing anything below capital level in a single burst, and taking care of doom swarms (the fight before the Ziggurat, for example, was basically carried by the tachyon spam)
For a full meme tournament kind of shenanigans one could just abuse the broken Derelic contingent skill with meaingnless D mods on low tech ships instead and abuse not being able to take damage at all.
1. Sacrificing mounts is specific to low-tech
My experience: Not really. Depending on the build, but it can happen to many ships. Scarab used to have its side mounts left open, until they were removed. Medusa rarely ever has a full PD completement, more often it has just 4 or 3 PD guns in the smalls. Apogee doesn't really need its smalls, and according to some people, not the mediums, either! Paragon can have most of its mounts filled (not the smalls though, lol), or it can sacrifice everything but 4 larges and 4 mediums to become a station smasher. For midline, Conquest is obvious and Eagle often gets its energy mediums downsized because of the focus on ballistics. And for low-tech ships that sometimes get mounts unfilled, Ons and Legion are also obvious (do you really need these smalls?), and until recently Ons was also downsized often, though HBI is supposed to remedy that. Dominator also sometimes drops its smalls, but it depends mostly on whether flaks get into the mediums or not. Low-tech isn't any more likely to drop mounts or undersize than other design types, though.
2. High-tech is good at kiting, beams are great.
My experience: beams are ok at bullying pirates, but beams on anything that isn't a Paragon or an Odyssey belongs in the trash. It takes impractical number of beams to overwhelm dissipation of bigger ships and other high tech ships, and especially the Remnants. High-tech ships with short ranged, hard flux weapons fare significantly better, than if they were to use beams. High-tech's advantage is the speed and shields, allowing them to get in, deal damage, then get out and vent, while other fast, allied ships come in to occupy the enemy's attention.
Ironically enough, it's midline that benefits the most from beams, because they can actually support it with hard flux at the range that beams have. Ion Beam and High Intensity Laser in particular are great for midline.
3. Frigates only really got more decent recently because they got some proper slots.
My experience: Hyperion has significantly changed, yes, from 2 mediums and 4 smalls to 3 mediums, it was accompanied by significant stat buffs: its flux capacity increased by a factor of two and a half (from 3300 to 8000) and dissipation was nearly doubled (from 280 to 500). And additional damage boosts from skills no longer affect frigates. And Wolfpack Tactics buffs frigates specifically... Another frigate that has been buffed in 0.95 is Scarab and is one of the better frigates now. Do you know what mounts it has? 5 small energy ones and 2 small synergy ones. Tempest has 2 mediums, but it was good in 0.9.1 and it's still good now.
4. Ballistics don't have long ranges
My experience: while it's true only few ballistic weapons have ranges matching or exceeding range of beams, they more than make up for that with their hard flux options outranging energy hard flux options. You don't have to have the most range in the game, you can just have more range than your enemy.
5. Energy Weapon Mastery and Heavy Blasters are situational
My experience: What? EWM is one of the better skills for high-tech, because its range limitations and range at which high-tech will fight at optimal performance is the same. For Paragon and Odyssey EWM might be the worse choice, but for every other high-tech ship? It wants to get in and blast the enemy with Ion Pulsers and Heavy Blasters. Even just ~+15% damage against all targets is comparable to Target Analysis's variable damage bonus to some targets. Heavy Blaster is viable for all non-capital high-tech ships, because with s-mods and Flux Regulations, you can afford to fire them, and with them you can take sabots instead of other missiles, so breaking through shields isn't an issue, either. And no, I don't use SO or phase ships (except to demonstrate how broken DC and phase ships respectively are in my videos), I have not used it once in 0.95 or 0.9.1.
6. Ballistic weapons are worse
My experience: I think the most consistent detail of all Medusa and Paragon loadouts was putting ballistics in their universal mounts. It's because of their greater flux efficiency, range and damage to shields.
In conclusion, what I have to ask is: are we even playing the same game? I am being serious. While I also have found low-tech to be worse this version than high-tech, there's like one specific thing in common and almost everything else diametrically different.
1: Never said it was specific to low tech, in fact I'm pretty sure I said small mounts in general are worthless with very few exceptions, namely anti matter blasters (energy) and railguns, the rest more often than not hurts you more than the enemy, in fact one of the great things about annihilator rockets is not their damage, which is rather bad, but the fact that it's a constant barrage of rockets that makes the enemy "take" a lot more flux damage by activating all it's PD against harmless rockets than they would if they'd just let them hit the shield, that being said I never said that was an issue exclusive to low tech ships either, many high tech ships also ignore small mounts, like the examples you've given, the great difference is that low tech tends to have even more mounts, and even less flux, which makes the issue far worse for them than high tech.
Besides, high tech has some nasty options for their lower mount size, a plasma cannon for instance is probably worth as much as 3 different weapon mounts in one, in both flux and damage, so you can really focus the role of a ship if it can handle such a monster, heavy blasters are no different for smaller ships, a ton of firepower in a single mount and, like you said, it makes the small mounts irrelevant in many cases.
2: Yeah, beams are bad in 1v1 duel scenarios, too bad this never happens, in a real fight the bad designs of the AI ships firing PDs all over the place against random crap tend to overload themselves by themselves, once that happens the tachyons will just eat through the remaining shield and hull at once, hegemony is specially guilty of this, the only exception being remnants and, again, not because of some crappy PD systems, but because their shields and flux dissipation, and mobility are just too great, so you either need to burst down their shilds all at once, or pressure them with hard flux.
Which just so happens to be accomplished by your own radiant fielding 3 plasma cannons 2 cyclone reapers and 4 M sabot missiles, not even other radiants can handle that kind of burst.
3:You guys mention these few ships as if they were proof that "not much changed for frigates" yet forget to mention that people complaining about frigates are ONLY complaining about them, when was the last time anyone mentioned the devastating firepower of a Lasher in any real endgame conflicts? Answer: Never.
Hyperion has a massive shield reduction and some actual firepower (and the flux to use it) now.
The scarab is scary yes, and you know why it's scary? 3x Anti matter blasters, the ones I specifically mentioned to work on hunter/phase kind of ships, the little fucker can use it's special skill which is not much different from a phase as it can just dodge anything and get anywhere, and blast away at a bigger ship's engines while the flux regenerates, again, not because of some no damage small mounts, antimatter blasters deal more burst than most non torpedo weapons in the game.
4: By hard flux options you're talking about the railgun family and mjolnirs (for the one ship that can use them effectivelly), like I mentioned, and if you decide to equip them on any other low tech ships along with pretty much anything else even @ max flux dissipation be prepared to self destruct before the enemy even has to overload your own shields.
5: I said it's situational, you said it's good, where's the contradiction? I never said it wasn't good, a doom, or any phase ship will want to take it, in fact it's mandatory that they take it, if a player would fly something like a scarab themselves, for some reason, they'd want to take it as well, any hunter ships would want to take that mastery, but hunter ships themselves are niche and if you take them against the real endgame challenges you're probably going to spend a lot of time repairing and recovering ships over and over again, hell I even got *** that one paragon died against the 2 doritos.
Edit: Another additional issue this brings up: Officer caps, who in their right mind would waste officers on small ships when the numbers are so limited? Even if it would be great for them, they often fly officerless anyway
6: Medusa used to be good, now it's just a worse version of the new and newly buffed small HT ships, as for paragon, yeah, I do use 2 railguns on the M slots with the timid officer I was about to discard and it was surprisingly good, but for a paragon that doesn't retreat nonstop you're probably better off just using something cheaper to trick the AI into not venting and eventually overloading themselves, like ion or grav beams since you can fire them across the screen.
