Added the Outworld's Alliance as well as my understanding of the counts and costs for each ship.
I think the LCN overspending on a navy is fairly reasonable :)
W.r.t. thrust 3/5 lock-in, the screen launcher might change the equation somewhat since you can approach to short range without taking fire. This makes a 4/6 design with short range / high power weapons potentially a viable alternative.
Another variation on the "standard" broadside approach is using a nose mounted weapon (as per the Anvil), which I'm a bit enchanted with at the moment. Having twice as many weapons and a worse critical table may be worth the drawback of giving the enemy a bonus of 1 to hit.
I would go so far to say that screen launchers would effectively render any non-point-blank strategy near trivial, though Id have to push minis around a table, with custom designs, to be sure.
Now, this is largely a false artifact of our game system - in ‘real’ space, with both sides maneuvering in 3 dimensions and moving through all intervening space rather than ‘teleporting’ point to point (such that one cannot simply worry about being covered at the end of each move), I doubt the perfect walls of impenetrable terrain would be a thing. Certainly a more detailed movement system (phased, perhaps) would largely cure this, while still giving them some value.
NacNose/Lasertail likely dominates. You essentially double your firepower, and largely double your armor, at the price of pointing your bad critical chances at the opponent. Given that sort of firepower and resilience advantage, I dont believe that the criticals will matter, inasmuch as the other side is dead. Fleet engagements will make this effect stronger, due to the tendency of ships to be hard killed in single exchanges (though this too is an artifact of our turn based tabletop game)
Im not sure how to cure that, if needful, though if I did my temptation would be to further increase the accuracy advantage of engaging a nose or tail on target aspect target - one cannot as effectively apply delta-v (and generate misses!) with manuvering thrusters as one can with main drive (it is my default assumption that all ships are to some degree drunk-walking at all times, else ‘missing’ wouldnt be a thing, espc with lasers fired at kilometer long targets)