Appreciate the feedback everyone! I think part of my problem is getting too excited about building a war fleet without the tech/big enough shipyards to back it up.
I think better sensors and smaller/more numerous missiles will help me out a lot.
I guess the last question is: Am I even in the right ballpark for including railgun escorts for point missile defense? I guess I was more including them from an RP perspective as I really like the idea of railguns as a weapon, and the wiki says they make decent low-tech point defense (though I'm probably using them incorrectly haha). The reason for the speed disparity is that I thought their tracking speed was limited by the speed of the ship, so I wanted to make sure they were fast enough. . .
Thanks again!
Using them wrong?! You did it perfectly, your fleet is good and as soon an I saw it I noticed you did your research. Now for the criticism.
Its much harder to get big ships to go fast than it is go make small ships go fast, so the most efficient way to do pd with railguns is fighters, although big ships have the bonus of being good beam warships overall.
Size 8 missiles are great, I love them and I use them, but the traditional missile war doctrine is to go for size 6 missiles so yeah people are going to talk about that.
You are still in ion engines era so you shouldn't really scour the galaxy trying to pick a fight with NPR's and Spoiler races, but if you find them, I dont think 68 million kilometers range will impress them, so unless you know they are going for beam weapons, prepare to endure some hardcore missile strikes.
I also see you are going for full size missile launchers, but the problem with tose is that unless you missiles are somewhat armoured or really really fast (like 40.000km/s fast) they can have problems piercing through some harder active defenses, while with reduced launchers you can usually get larger salvoes that are much better at overwhelming the enemy.
There is another thing we can improve with the design of your missiles. You see the missile will penetrate a number of layers equal to the square root of the total damage (9 damage goes through 3 layers 16, 4 layers and so on) and since you dont seem to be going for shock damage, it would be better if you toned down the raw damage on your missile to a solid 16 and worked on things like hit chance and such. You can probably make much faster and agile missiles than these. Its also generally a good idea to go for engine boost ic you are working with missiles since missile speed makes your missiles harder to hit, increases hit chance and shortens the window of time the enemy has to engage your missiles.
Try bringing a missile collier with this fleet, your magazines are not the most impressive and while they may be ok for some engagements, the bigger fate deciding battles will require way more volleys.
Having a dedicated sensor ship is also generally a good idea, it big passive sensors can usually spot the enemy from far away without denouncing your position, which by itself can be a huge tactical advantage.
As for your pd philosophy so far, it be stronk design. Gud design. Human design. Best design.