It's the exact same build options the Aurora has.
And that was a concern of mine when it was first teased. There's already a number of ships that pretty much have exact same build and design philosophies. I don't mind the Shrike because it's cheap. So either Fury or Aurora needs to change a little bit since imo they're too similar too each other. Bunch of medium energy and medium mounts, 180 omni shield, mobility system. Aurora has the advantage of having a better mobility system that can go backwards, that's it. If the fast high tech ships had more options for builds I wouldn't complain I think, right now it seems weird to have many same options which are basically "punch down" ships.
What I’m hearing is that the Fury doesn’t have a place because the Aurora exists.
I kind of view the Aurora as the player ship version of the Fury. Mostly because "punching down" ships punch up by wolf packing (i.e. multiple Furies for every one of bigger ships, having eliminated the smaller escorts quickly). At 20 DP per ship, Furies are much better at getting bodies on the field than 30 DP Auroras. In a DP limited situation, I'll typically take 3 Furies over 2 Auroras. Also more benefit from converted hangar (i.e. non-SO builds).
The situation where that doesn't apply is where I only have 1 of a resource, namely player piloting. At which point player in Auroras has more of a multiplicative effect than a player in a Fury. An Aurora can pack enough sabots to knock out the shields on Capital while still running 2 Heavy Blasters and an Ion Pulser. So if I was running a high tech cruiser fleet, one composition might be 1 Aurora (player), 9 Furies, 2 Hyperions. Overall fast, mobile playstyle where one ship distracts a capital each, and the rest eliminate escorts and then focus efforts on the capital(s).
As for too many punch down style ships, if a ship is fast, it basically has to be a punch down style. If it's fast, it can catch smaller ships, and if it's a cruiser, it has cruiser grade firepower and can kill smaller ships quickly.
So what do we have for a breakdown on combat cruisers in the current release?
Fast, punch down style? Fury (90), Aurora (80), Falcon (80), all with mobility boosts and no large mounts.
A mid-speed Eradicator (70), which has solid burst in AAF or pursuit in Burn drive, and no large mounts.
Slow "punch up" ships which include Dominator (30), Champion (60), and Apogee (60), each with 2 large mounts.
Which leaves the ugly duckling of the Eagle that is both slow (50) and no large mounts, although Alex is dropping the DP point to 20 it sounds like, so we'll see if that helps. I mean 3 or maybe 4 out of 8 being fast combat cruisers doesn't sound crazy when the only other option is being slow.
As for tweaking mounts, there's not much to be done in that space, unless you just want to add longer range weapons. For dash in/dash out, and vent playstyle, sabots are pretty optimal as they are the only burst kinetic missiles available. Similarly, Heavy Blasters are essentially a large weapon in a medium mount. Of vanilla guns, only Plasma Cannons and Mjolnir cannons have higher DPS. Only Hellbores and Tachyon Lances have higher penetration. Being able to slap on a Plasma Cannon basically just means 100 more base range and missile/fighter pass through (which is a really nice perk admittedly).
As far as I can tell, Heavy Blasters were designed such that fast high tech ships didn't need a large energy mount and the extra range that potentially entails. As for burst (like Autopulse), the current Ion Pulsars can fill that role pretty well.
To be honest, the only other thing you can do with fast energy mounts is beams, which are terrible in isolation and merely OK if massed. Although even massing them can be hard since ships block each other. That one tournament with beholders (i.e. slow ships with tactical laser drone fighters, not unlike Xyphos) was good because they all shot through each other and could focus fire better as well as shoot down missiles together.
Actually, that makes me wonder, instead of High Scatter Amplifier halving range and giving beams hard flux as a hullmod, what if Alex doubled down on the long range beam spam and made a hullmod such that all beams gained allied ship passthrough (like what the Paladin has). Would that provide enough of boost to make graviton beam Furies and Auroras more viable? It also would give some boost to the PD/anti-fighter capabilities of Eagles.