The main thing about mesons is that they totally ignore shields and armour. So while they only do 1 point of damage, that point is automatically an internal. This has some good and bad points. Large systems are hard to destroy with only 1 point of damage. The chance is equal to 1/HTK. You can see how many hits to kill (htk) that a system has. For example a 15cm laser has a htk of 2, a 25cm has a htk of 4 and a quad turret 15cm laser has a htk of 8. This gives any single meson shot a chance of destroying the system respectivly 50%, 25%, and 12.5% each. A really large system like a jump drive for a large ship might have a htk of 30-50. Obviously it will take a lot of meson hits to give a good chance to kill such a system. This is the down side to them only doing 1 point of damage. The up side is that with a little bit of work you can use smaller mesons to max out your fire control range, and have a good rate of fire as well. A 30cm meson can reach as far as a ship-board fire control can fire. A 40cm will pretty much do the same for a pdc fire control. This means that there is less reason to reasearch the big mesons, and you can put those reasearch points into increasing the range multiplier, and the capaciter size. The other up side is that if they hit, they are automatically doing internal damage, so at long range they will start hurting really quickly. They do not lose damage over range as most beam weapons do.
Brian