Formations

[AL]

O.o One has to wonder how much time do you have to spend setting up the infrastructure to properly support this beast...
Why the hell it has sorium extractors, rec facilities and cryo berths ??
And whats up with those slow, small warhead torpedos ?

The torpedoes are MIRV designs so you can't see their true payload. One has a single fast WH 25 missile and the other has I think 10x WH4 size-1 missiles.
The main idea for the design was to be as independent from my colonies as possible, and to be able to take on small to medium sized fleets on its own.
The rec facilities and sorium miners handle the independence thing, and cyro is for picking up lifepods.

Why so many fire controls? (...) I'm not asking to criticize just to understand, I heard that in the case of say point defense it was important to have multiple fire controls so they can engages multiple salvos

As a general rule of thumb, the more fire controls the better. This gives you redundancy in case of battle damage, and more targeting flexibility. In the case of missiles, it also breaks up your broadside into a number of independent salvos, each of which require a separate fire control for the enemy to be able to engage them all.

Why the survey scanners and EM sensor (pretty sure EM passives are built into actives). .   

So as I mentioned re: Lossmar, it's part of the whole independence/do everything package. Since I envisage this guy just lurking around the fringes of known space, it is likely to be on-scene at any potential encounters with hostile races. This would allow me to immediately begin to hunt for the jump point to their home system instead of waiting for the survey fleet to arrive.
EM sensors are actually distinct from active sensors. While it is true that you require EM tech in actives, active sensors can not actually detect EM emissions from enemy ships. I think the technobabble explanation is the active grav component sends out pulses periodically, and the EM component detects the waves which bounce off any objects and come back towards you. Since the EM sensor has to be precisely calibrated to detect these grav waves, it cannot be used to detect the normal spectrum of EM radiation anymore.

Speaking of, what is your point defense supposed to be?

I had a bit of a different take on defense here. If I actually feel threatened, then I can use my size-1 missiles defensively to thin the incoming salvos a little. Otherwise, my main point defense comes from CIWS (which I renamed as a "shield system"). If there are no other targets in beam weapon range, I could also use my railguns as extra point blank defense. For the most part though, I would mainly rely on my (fairly beefy) shielding to absorb any incoming fire seeing how it can regenerate a bit over 30 damage points every 5second increment. From what I've seen, there's not a lot around that can reliably get through this level of shielding.

Also, interesting that you made missiles stand in as standard cannons.

Heh, kudos to my buddy @Vandermeer for the inspiration for this one. Do check out some of his writeups in the fiction subforum, he's got some pretty good stuff out there.
Also, sorry for the late reply, didn't actually notice your post until just now.

[Borealis4x]

How do you define where the "front" of your formation is? How do you make sure it points in the direction you want it to? I'm trying to build a formation around my flagship with beam ship squadrons in the front, missiles ship squadrons in the second row, and carriers in the back.

[ChildServices (OP)]

The "Threat" is the direction that will be used as "North" with regards to the "Offset Bearing" variable. "No Offset" means that the ship will position itself directly between the protected task group and whatever the threat is.
"Task Group" is what you are protecting, and "Distance" is how far the protecting fleet will be from that task group.

To get something to always face the enemy, you want to set the "threat" to the general direction of the enemies. It may work to just set the "threat" to the protected task group's heading, but that doesn't help if what you're escorting is an escort of something else and thus has no actual move orders. I personally never use task group heading as the threat because I might tell the "lead" ship to move away from the enemy, causing my entire formation to wheel around and face the other way instead of just "reversing" and continuing to perform its escort role.