Update on the Falcon: I've been doing an only mission bounty run (no contact bounties, no system bounties, no exploration unless the things are literally in the system with a bounty and right there) and the new Falcon is pulling its weight. Its anchoring a fast strike fleet that I've just started to take up against 200k bounties. Current fleet: Falcon with damaged weapon mounts D mod (recovered from a drifting wreck by story point), 3 shrikes of various D mod states one of which I'm piloting, a good hammerhead with a decent lvl 5 officer, 2 brawlers (one is a reckless SO killer because of officer and its fantastic), 2 tempests, 2 omens, 1 wolf, 2 kite A's (surprisingly good at distraction duty for so cheap). 3 other level 2 officers whom I haven't mentored yet. I've got coordinated maneuvers for +20% speed on everything and crew training for +15% CR, but otherwise just have 3 skills in combat (impact mitigation, target analysis, point defense).
Falcon Build: 2x Heavy Autocannon, 1x Ion Beam, 1x Phase Lance, 2x lrpd (front), 2x pd laser (back), 2x dual atropos, dedicated targeting core (no ITU yet), 30 vents, 14 caps. Steady officer who had damage control, then I got a lucky roll and added ordinance expertise for 132 extra flux.
The ship still lacks raw DPS - its not winning any contests for rolling up an easy fleet in fastest time. But what its bringing is a combination of range, speed, and defense thats letting it engage and lockdown bigger ships or hunt smaller ships. I don't know if the 5 speed and 50 flux is critical or not but it can't hurt: the ship is notably able to kite and also fire this weapon compliment with very good uptime. It successfully handled a level 6 Aurora by falling back under pressure while firing: it gave a bunch of ground, but then the Aurora was high on hard flux because of kinetics, and the ion beam then disabled some engines (and then I called in the frigate pack and bye bye aurora). For killing small ships, it has a steady officer so sometimes needs encouragement (eliminate orders) to really put itself forward, but when it does it has the speed to quickly close to phase lance range.
I don't know if this Falcon build/fleet role will last into endgame as very useful or not. At that point I'll have capital units with a lot longer range and heavy cruisers to act as anchors themselves, so I might want my lighter units to have higher damage like an artillery Hammerhead/Sunder. For midgame being the only cruiser in a destroyer fleet its being very valuable though.