Almost certainly not - I believe nothing modifies base range unless it says so explicitly, and so far the only examples are Ballistic Rangefinder and new-HSA. I believe Elite Point Defense is more like "Advanced Optics for PD", where it's a flat bonus added after multiplicative bonuses to base range.
Unless something explicitly says "base range" it does not affect the base range.
Aww darn. Oh well. Welp, presumably the PD range bonus stacks with Advanced Optics, so now I just need to wait for some enterprising mod author to make a 50-small energy slot ship so I can put 50 mining lasers on it for 600*1.55 + 200 + 200 = 1330-range 1500-DPS hard flux beams for 500 flux (and 15 hit strength, harhar). Or well...that Arkgneisis (I think) ship using PD lasers (which still gets up to 1020 range) or something. Will be fun to mess around with.
Come to think of it, HSA will be much more deadly against fighters, since they can't really take much hard flux, even if they could've absorbed the soft flux.
Unassigning skills that boosted officer level/elite skills will result in either the officer becoming a mercenary on a new contract, or losing excess skills
Hmm...does this differentiate between officers that you leveled up, versus officers that you found in cryopods? Not sure if this is why cryopod officers will now be level 5 or 7 but not level 6 (to make it so that level 6 officers were ones that you leveled up, not found). If so, then what happens to officers in the current (0.95a) version of the game, where you can find level 6 cryopod officers? (It's possible that cryopod officers have a tag specifically saying they're from cryopods to get around this or something -- but then maybe it's a level 5 cryopod officer that you leveled to 6.)
Oh, another question: Will the AI be adjusted to not plasma burn into hulks in the ship's way? Since that happens a fair amount of the time, making the ship flameout and often fly into the enemy fleet at high speed and die. (Here's a funny video of an Odyssey doing exactly this: It was lagging behind, unable to figure out how to get around a Radiant hulk, then it decided to plasma burn, hit the hulk, flamed out, and flew past my ships into the enemy fleet at over 300 su, although it survived:)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyLdzlOjD9kI should say, though, before going further: in the videos you've posted, the AI behavior, specifically for the Odysseys, looks strange. Maybe it's something broadside-ship specific, though I haven't seen anything even similar to what you're observing. It's possible that a mod you're using is factoring in somehow, too. The Odyssey hanging back due to a plasma cannon being installed doesn't make any sense, and I'm not seeing it on my end, hmm.
In this case, all the officers are reckless, and the fleet is operating under full assault mode (not sure how that changes things). I'm only using utility mods (to me, the vanilla game's combat, ships, weapons, etc. have so much theoretical and analytical richness that I still haven't gotten "bored" of it nor felt like I've explored all the possible combinations, to want to explore mods thus far this update, especially since my playtime is pretty limited now), although it's always possible that a mod designated "utility" may affect the game's AI.
I took out all the mods I could, leaving only Captain's Log and Detailed Combat Results (I think they can't be removed from an existing save), and redid it with and without the plasma cannon. It can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeS60EXWxVkI used the non-plasma cannon save first to verify that the Odysseys will attack normally, then loaded the plasma cannon save for the bulk of the video. (I turned on full assault at around 6:17 in the video). For example at around 7 minutes in, you can see Odyssey 3 setting the Radiant as its target, but just stays away firing Hurricanes instead of going in. So this behavior still happens. I tried to find the ship that the Odyssey was targeting to see how it behaved toward its target throughout the fight.
I don't think "stay away if far away, close in if close" is necessarily some command in the vanilla AI. Rather, I'm guessing it's an emergent property based on some different AI decision-making steps. For example, it seems like in this update, the AI over-prioritizes far-away missiles like pilums and proximity charges. Well, the Remnant fleet launches plenty of both (the latter from Flash wings). So it's possible that ships farther away see all those missiles and decide to stay away, while ships closer to the front lines see a juicy enemy target and rush in to attack it. Or sometimes I've seen them target some frigate or another that's behind 3 or 4 other ships, so they might go in to take out what they think is an easy target (since they're ignoring other ships), while that frigate is too far for a ship that's farther away, which targets the bigger ships and decides it's too dangerous so stays away instead.
Or it may be some property of broadside behavior. (Almost all the weapons are on the left side; the only weapons that can hit the right side are the missiles and a couple of minipulsers.) I don't know how the AI treats broadside so can't really comment on that. Or maybe the plasma cannon makes the Odyssey think it'll overflux itself (since its weapon flux becomes greater than its flux dissipation) and thus decides not to go in with broadsides. Don't know.
Yes I do have the save and will send it to you once I've cleaned it up a bit (it's adjusted with things like linking to my custom "number" officer portraits to help me quickly identify which ship is which, so I'll have to edit those back). Another possibility is, since I manually edit the save files by typing in stuff sometimes, I may have inadvertently changed something that affects the AI, although usually it's just stuff like the officer personalities, etc., so I don't see how that may happen, but it's a possibility. This is the "test fleet" that I use to try out different fleets and strategies, so I probably have over a hundred saves of this particular fight (with different fleet setups) at this point, heh.
The setup is fairly straightforward. Start with 3 Odysseys (since they take longer to get into position) and a Hyperion, have the Hyperion grab the upper left objective, one of the Odysseys grab the right objective, set a "Defend" order to the left of the right objective. Once they've grabbed the objectives, deploy the remaining Hyperions, cancel the objective orders (so that they all gather around the "Defend" point), then once they sort of gather up, turn on full assault. After that, no more commands are put in, it's running under pure AI control at that point.
If the Odysseys have HIL in that large energy slot, then the fleet actually has a fair chance of winning the battle, with no losses (it really depends on how the Odysseys lined up at the beginning and if the Hyperions do a good enough job of distraction/harassment, though). I *think* the HIL has a long enough engagement range that the AI will move in rather than sitting back, but I don't really know how the AI works so not sure if that's the reason. I was testing if the plasma cannon would be better (since it does more DPS and does hard flux instead of soft flux) when I encountered this issue.