The only weapon system that does not need fire control is CIWS as it is built into the system.

A couple CIWS on each ship is usually a good idea.

The drawback to doing this is that the ciws system only protects the mounting ship.  If you have any size fleet then the total point defense of even single gauss turrets and fire control will be higher.  Effectivly each ciws is equal to a single gauss turret.  With two ciws systems you will take up about as much space as a single turret with fire control would take up.  So if you have 4 ships you have the equivilant of 4 ciws systems total, but they all protect all of the ships.  Compare that with having two ciws per ship.  If you have more ships then the total goes up and more missiles will be shot down.  I usually only put ciws on civilian designs that may see combat (troop transports ect) and high priority targets like the big sensor ships that are often the first target or the largest class of warships that I build.  Those are the ships that are going to tend to be shot at anyway so not having the extra turrets for general fleet defense doesn't meen as much when they are the target anyway.

Brian

I'm pretty sure yes, gauss needs it. 

I do both.  I put a little PD on the cruisers themselves... and then have dedicated PD boats.  Mostly for roleplaying purposes.

I suspect that the map is not moving (ie its centered on the same co-ordinates) but that everything else is.  Unless you select "no orbital motion" options, the only immobile items in a system are likely to be the primary star & the jump points.   I just zoom out to run intervals & zoom in to see the action.  If you zoom out & then run automatic intervals you can watch you missiles crawl accross the screen (until something happens) You can left clisk to center on a particular thing of interest, but when you run an interval the focus will remain on the old position of the TG or whatever, not wherever it moved to during the inteval

Beyond a certain zoom level, it centers on the primary.

Ok, as there doesn't seem to be a way to give an NPR tech or a fleet. I'll just test my own fleet versus my own fleet .

EDIT: Combat seems to be working for my ships. Although my designs seems to be very defensive orientated. I have one question though: How do I make the map not move to when I advance in time? I keeps jumping to some other place and I want to watch my missiles...

Ok, thanks for the replies.
I have now created a player race on Titan (copied DB ofc) and I gave it some of the predesigned warships, although they kinda out-tech me.
How do change them to an NPR? I hope that is possible.

In order of your questions.
To create a player race you need to be in SM mode.  Go to the system detail screen (F9) and in the bottom right there is a set of commands to use.  If you want them in a system you have already explored go to that system, click on the planet you want them on and then click on create empire.  On the screen that comes up in the upper left area there is a check box for making the race an NPR or a Player race.  If you set it to player race you will be able to control it.  You will need to switch back and forth between the two races so keep that in mind.

2.) You need 1 fire control per x launchers.  I usually go with 1 for 5 launchers.  Each time tick the fire control can fire on a new target without changing the targeting of previous salvo's.  If that fire control is destroyed then all salvo's that are still in flight lose their lock-on.  If the missiles have their own sensors they will keep flying but otherwise they self-destruct.

3.) When you use a conventional start the NPR that is created will have a normal start set of reasearch points.  In effect they will start exploring and growing imediatley so they do have a bit of a tech lead.  You will probably catch back up after a while however as most players invest far more heavily into reasearch than the npr's do.

4.)  Lagrange points are associated with gas giants.  They are form of insystem jump point.  From any lagrange point (lp) you can jump to any other lp in the same system without needing a jump engine.  You also do not suffer from the jump effect on your sensors/fire control.  It is a method to get from 1 star to another usually in multi star systems.

Brian

What's the process I would use to do this? I think I prebuilt some pieces before but I'm not sure they got used. 

At the instant you click to add the build task to your shipyard (with the use prebuilt components tickbox checked), Aurora checks for components in your stockpile, and reduces the build time/cost accordingly for what's available.  Once ship construction has started, it's irrelevant what new components get added - they won't be used on any existing jobs.

Although apparently it will take 2 years to add another slipway at this point (does this increase the larger they get?)

Yes, it depends on the size of the slipway to be built.