Put a fork in it, it's done.
I have now exausted my abilities to work with SE4 on this. If anyone else wants to try, you're welcome.
The problem is the disparity in ship sizes. Light Cruisers are 200kt, SDs are 8000kt. This means I have to use mounts, in order to keep the space used for drives and brige, LS, etc fair.
SE4's mount system rounds down. This means with the size reductions I have to use, many components end up being zero KT in size.
Another problem is the SDs behave oddly. I filled them with just my drive system and the normal components, and they had the problems I described earlier in the thread- fire one salvo then refuse to do much of anything. Knocking the size down to BBs, and everything works fine..so I have to conclude these 8000kt behemoths are just too much for SE4 to handle. 17 shield generators, 40 Armor components, 30 APB XIIIs, 5000 shield regeneration from damage, etc etc etc..too much stuff for the engine to track.
Phoenix-D