I’ve always preferred fixed weapons because having a fuzzy range of motion where your joystick inputs don’t map to ship movement sounds great until you have to navigate through a tight / dense environment, or translate movements quickly such as when flying in atmosphere at very low altitude...
Based on my travels in other forums and channels it would be in our interest to keep locations of valuable spots a bit hush hush as the game gets closer to release. There are a lot of other groups who are pretty keen on eating rocks.
This means there are a stack of weirdos out there.
The starter ships are a lot better than we give them credit for; it’s easy to assume they’re underwhelming when you are sitting on the bridge of your 600i.
My take away from this is that if you don’t yet have your ships from the Polaris upwards, aim to obtain them before the game starts.
You may not care, which is perfectly reasonable, but don’t anticipate being able to obtain them in-game on your own.