Killed 2 colonies of star swarm in my current game.
Used 6 destroyers with 4x3size launchers with 20 secs reload time and 15 mil km missiles.
Pretty boring killing about 200 of those drones, mothership was killed by my particle beam weapons from 150k km range.
Never made any shot at me, and since i am faster then she is, it was just a matter of time.
Also i was dissapointed with no wreck.

I jumped into a system that I thought had Precursors - with fair force but under stocked with missiles - and discovered Swarm instead - I destroyed all by 10 of the 120 FACs but when the mothership turned up I just didn't quite have a enough missiles left to destroy it - must have been close but no cigar - damn - well time to run away boys!
What is the turn of phrase... oh yes..

I'll be back

I may have encountered something like that too : have dealt with about 100+ small ships that spawned from a 1K/s big ships with about 600 shields, but those regenerating wildly.

Made it back out of the system and was planning to try with mesons to skip the shields . . .  but what's written above may mean that this would be a bad idea !

Is there a way to scan a ship and determine its fittings ? or can you only learn from bad experience (eg being fired upon)

Yep, they harvest asteroids, wrecks, and I do think planets (at least their minerals) too and make new gunboats out of the resources. They may even make new motherships, but I am not sure on that one.

May I introduce,  Evil Steve             

I wanna remember that they make sifferent types of ships depending what is needed, motherships included.

[spoiler:28gxg18i]Yep, mothership of the FACs. It´s shields are incredible!
Fought one of those, fortunately not too close to home in my last game. Managed it by keeping my torpedo cruisers at 130k and punding it for half an hour <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_smile.gif" alt="" title="Smile" />.

In my newest game, I have just destroyed the FACs of one of these, about 200 gunboats. Took me some 5.500 missiles (every single missile I brought and yes, the hit rate was horrible) and still had to take care of the last 20 in close combat. Lost my entire FAC fleet in order to buy time so my escort cruisers could finish of some 50 with AMMs.
The combat took some 5 hours realtime and I am still in the process of cleanup (i.e. killing off the 120 cripples)[/spoiler:28gxg18i]

200 cripes, last time I went into the system I found one of these in I got jumped by 22 FACs and having fired all of my ASMs at the mothership to no effect aside from a little armour damage I was down to a desperate run to the gate and using all but 40 of my entire stock of AMMs to kill those 22 off. First time I went in there were ten FACs to kill so I'm getting the horrible feeling that these things multiply over time???

I managed to one-shoot one of those mothership with my FAC squadron. 20 FAC Hermes, each with 8 box-launchers firing MIRV separating in 4 heads dealing 4 damage each.
Meanwhile, in my home system, 30 cruise missile from planetary fortress, firing from 1.5 billion km away, dealing 50 damage each, didn't manage to one-shoot it. But the second salvo did.

Of course, the real problem is the shield. If you don't have a strike strong enough to pass the shield, you will never destroy it.

okay, just board the living ship bringing Forks, Knives, and a portable stove.