Also, it is really slow. It'll likely never close up enought to use it's particle beam.
In my time playing Aurora, there's one thing I've learned about the non-missile weapons. You don't get them for offensive purposes. You get them in case the enemy likes to get in your face.
Then simply don't get it. You can fit a a lot more missiles if you don't. It's possible to make interesting non missile ships though, they just really need to be able to outrun everything else, have lots of PD and enough armor to shrug a good handful of hits
Have you not fought precursors before? You can't outrun something 15 times your tech level. The swarm loves, loves, loves to send a horde of super fast ships with close range weapons into your face as well. Even a few pages back in this thread there are people talking about alien ships designed exclusively for RAMMING into other ships.
I fought precursors, and quite a lot of their ships have been designed with missiles in mind, and actually had a bit more range than the missiles I had at the time. Still, you don't need to outrun then, as long as you shoot it before it reaches you. If you get a 60M-120M range missile you'll fire lots of salvos before they get even close to range. You're not to outrun them, just kill before they get into their short ranged weapons.
About the Swarm, I find that more a job for the PD missile Launchers than beam weaponry. You'd still get somewhat more range, and they double duty as anti missile missile launchers. (or be technical, they are anti missile missile launchers that double duty as anti swarm missile launcher
).
Yeah, I guess strategically they can be annoying, as you'd need to have a supply line. Minerals, I'd recommend you'd get a couple extra-solar mining colonies ASAP, specially if your starting Sol is weak in some mineral.
On size, I say that because most starting warships tend to be kinda small. My current basic warship (and actually only), clocks 7500 tons. My next gen ships will be around 12k-15k, with a command ship at 20k (very nice sensors, some PD, and lots and lots of armor. It's also intended to draw missile fire from the rest of the task group). Heck, my cargo ship is at 30k tons (ok, technically to keep it cheap so the civilian sector build loads and loads of them), and my biggest ship (a salvager), is clocking at a little under 70k tons.
I've been using size 12 missiles, but have been finding it far too big. My next generation ship will have the main launchers at size 6, so I can fire more missiles and fire much faster. I might at some point design a Multiple Warhead Vehicles (MWV, becase technically MIRV can only be used for missiles that have reentry
), with size 24-30 (whatever size I use for PDCs to keep compatiblity), using drones (for the ridiculously huge extra range) carrying lots and lots of submissions, to fit the tactical role of long range artillery. Probably going to give them very nice passive sensors, and use missiles with their own sensors, so I don't need ultra powerful active sensors for the ship.
And on a side note, the ramming precursor ships are actually civilian ships. As they're unarmed, but still aggressive as all precursor ships, they go for the ramming speed. If you salvage a few of them that didn't got too damage, you'll probably get quite a few civilian components.