If mesons are the best and only viable option for beam fighters, then doesn't that suggest they are overpowered? I mean you are talking about throwing away potentially dozens of fighters on the chance that you get to land one or two meson hits, that's a fair amount of BP and research investment trading off for a couple of successful shots don't you think? It basically turns fighters into more expensive, lower damage long range missiles that penetrate armor.
Look at it this way, in VB6 Aurora the Star Swarm uses mesons exclusively and they require purpose built fleets to deal with safely because experienced players know they can't risk any ships being in range of their weapons for even one five second interval, could we really say that if they used railguns or lasers?
All this leaves aside the power of mesons in multi-faction, same planet games, in the last multiplayer game I participated in my faction got Meson PDCs online before anyone else and the only reason we didn't take over the world was because the person running the game made us stop. At low tech levels they are pretty much the ultimate weapon.
I don't think "git gud" is an appropriate response to criticisms of the weapon in this forum either, someone mentioned that if you lose your million ton warship to a single meson fighter then they deserve to, but proponents of meson fighters literally count on this scenario, if only bad people lose to meson fighters, then how can meson fighters be good? To me the answer is meson fighters are really good and the argument is disingenuous at best.
All that said, personally I don't know how mesons would compare in C# Aurora, I kinda think that as long as they aren't an early game technology that takes over multi-faction starts they might be just fine without other changes. But I like the idea of them being a ruin or spoiler specific tech, I think there should be more reasons to salvage and explore other than incremental upgrades.