To follow up, my ships advance on the unknowns as they fire on me, but my PD proves capable of shooting down all by 1 lucky missile. Once in beam range the other ships are chewed up and spit out by gauss turrets, rail guns, and plasma cannons, and finally one runner had the sense to flee from the battle. I eventually discovered that he had an EM sensor suite, and that shutting down my 22k GPS sensor let me catch up to him.