Well, I did the opposite; beams are intended for midrange / assault unless using HEF.
Kind've made more sense than making them kite monsters, other than allowing for glass-cannon HEF ships whose shields are down and take more damage. This mechanic kind of upsets the apple cart vs. anything with high dissipation rates.
You might run into problems with fighters being viable... even low-damage beam weapons already murder them.
High dissipation rates can always be countered with low shield efficiency. And, again, they don't have to do hard damage to be effective. Simply being able to trade some of your flux dissipation rate for some of theirs - at the right time, and without the enemy having much way to avoid it - is very powerful.
It creates true invulnerability scenarios for this weapon type if balance moves much outside a very narrow range.
Only for a beam-only ship design. Actually, the idea is for it to specifically create those scenarios with smaller ships vs larger ones - so, it actually isn't a narrow range, but one with an open end. Anything where ships have enough - or more than enough - dissipation to shrug off pure-beam attacks from smaller ships is in the "good" range.
Moreover, there are damage numbers showing shield damage that isn't actually happening, which makes it unintuitive.
Hmm. Well, it's sort of happening - it's just not hard damage. I do see your point, though.
And in Vanilla right now, with the introduction of skills, it's probably causing more problems than it solved. For example, a 100-Vent ship can shrug off pretty much any amount of beam fire once Hard Shields / char. skills are in place, amongst other things.
Again, I think you're working off the premise that beam weapons
have to do damage to be effective. Which is a reasonable premise, but isn't how they're designed
They're primarily pressure and support weapons, and only do well in an assault role vs something smaller or unshielded.
I understand that this is likely a big issue for your mod. You may wish to reconsider using beam weapons for the purpose you are - it's probably going to end up being a bit of a square peg/round hole thing. (And, as you said, restrict balance to a narrow range, which would be difficult to sort out).