Depends, those small ships usually have 3-5 armor, star swarm has more armor than the precursors.
But I'm almost completely certain the swarm has next to no point defense in their smaller ships. So splurge, get some missiles with 16 warhead strength.
Anyway I just sent my brand new mark II fleet into a system that I thought was precursor controlled, nope, the goddamn swarm was waiting for me. After loosing all my sensor ships and PD ships, and four destroyers, 14 ships total, I wittled them down to nothing and killed em all.
I found their queen, luckily she only moved around 1000 km/s and the swarms range on their mesons was around 60k km, so I just kept my fleet at 70k km and kept firing my lasers. After a long drawn out battle (she gets like 600-900 shields) I destroyed her.
I'm going to design some ships specifically for fighting the swarm cause the losses are unacceptable right now.
The commanders of the four remaining destroyers are all receiving service medals for their sacrifices in the field. And if I can save the life pods I'll give those commanders medals as well.
Edit: I had a weird thought, would it be possible to rotate the assignment of laser turrets to where I could have them all fire off one beam fire controller at different targets.
As it is now my destroyers have four turrets with a 20 sec recharge. So what if I fired one of them, switched the controller to another turret, fired that one, and eventually I could be firing continually every five seconds at seperate targets, I'm going to attempt this in my next swarm encounter, cause if my suspicions are correct, they should have mined my wrecks dry by now.