Yea tell me about it, you have to set all your targeting controls manually. And then set their targets manually, and during all this when one target ceases to be you have to retarget manually or that particular targeting computer does nothing but spam errors in the eventlog. Not to mention that after setting new targets it takes a few seconds based on the crew skill to ready the weapons (I guess lining up the targets and the time it takes for the crew to enter the targeting data).
And then there's the special design stuff you need to know. Like making sure your reactor has enough output to power all your lasers or your ships have big enough magasines to load all your custom made from scratch missiles of the correct size for your launcher. And then after all that you need to make sure your targeting computers are close to the capabilities of your weapons. Hell I still don't know how much power a laser system needs from looking at the ship design, and I havent even touched microwave, meson, gauss or torpedo technology yet.
@Gabeux That looks pretty nice, I wish my ships were that well thought out. The only thing my limited knowlege looks odd to me is the Near Ultraviolet point defense lasers. If I'm reading your design correctly you could probably use a lower tech laser wavelength for your point defense (Like visible light or something) I'm not sure if it would make the system cost less or anything, but 80000km range on a laser that only has fire control out to 20000km seems a bit overkill.
As for changing what the ship says it's type is, in the design screen there should be a dropdown for Hull type. It says criuser currently on your design. It has probably about 50 hull types and you can probably find what you are looking for. And even if you don't you can create your own by Hitting the "New Hull" button down on the bottom, typing in what you want to name the ship type and then put in what you want as the Short couple letter thing that goes infront of the name. For example one of my laser destroyers is DD Boa. DD stands for destroyer. But if I wanted to I could create e new hull type "Laser Destroyer" and give it the Abbreviation "LsrDD" and it would then be called "LsrDD Boa"