I feel for you. Ok...self advertisment here, read my AAR. Especially read the battles. They were one sided slaughters up to the last one which is closer to a roller coaster ride. To engage higher tech ships with lower tech ones is possible if the lower tech ships have missiles, with beams forget it. For the beam weapon to be effective (and this is true in starfire as well) you have to be able to dictate the engagement range. If your ships are slower they can't do that.
Beam armed ships fulfill secondary (but often vital) roles in Aurora but they aren't and, due to the nature of the game mechanics, can't be primary weapon platforms. To put this in starfire terms, the most advanced beam weapons have a maximum range of 1 hex, while the most primative missiles have a range of 10 hexes. Using AAMs in AS mode you would be at around 2 m km to 0.05 m km at the lowest tech levels. At higher tech levels even AAMs can have ranges of >20 m km while a beam weapon has no more than 1.5m km. The only arguement against missiles is that you have to build them and put them in colliers. So it is possible that a missile armed fleet exhausts their missiles before the destruction of the enemy force. It depends on a lot of other factors at that point what that means strategically. But beam weapons aren't just shorter ranged as is the case in starfire they are only viable at ranges so short it reduces their value to certain particular and specific circumstances.
In starfire due to the way the rules are made you have limits to the technological disparity you can face, in aurora they don't exist with respect to certain NPRs. In starfire terms you just ran into a race with Xr, and SBMs while you have T1 destroyers. You would not even see the ships destroying your fleet unless the enemy chose to allow that as well in starfire under those circumstances. Same same if you run into a race with SBMHAWK while you are T7 or fighters while you are T6. How many T2 races are going to survive an encounter with a T5 NPR battle fleet? Ind2 vrs T3 would also be a one sided slaughterfest.
In aurora the one stat that rules them all is speed. It needs to be changed but so far as I know it isn't in the pipeline to be changed. Missiles doing 10 pts of damage probably are moving at 20 000 km/s or more that means they cover 100,000 km in 5s and due to the way final movement is handled you are denied an interception chance. You need to deploy small craft with missile sensors or else build a bigger dedicated anti-missile sensor. But first you need to figure out how fast those missiles are moving.
The ships will be destroyed. It is not your fault, it is not the wiki's fault it is just the fact of the matter. Everyone who has played this game has lost ships due to the technological difference you can face. If you want to avoid their destruction activate the SM tool and move them out of that system, outside of that pray the NPRs run out of missiles.
About the only thing you can do now is disperse your ships and hope that by spreading them out one missile sensor will be able to pick up the inbound missiles far enough out to give you warning to allow your ships to engage. Your beam weapons have the range to mutually support even with the ships seperated by 50K km. Though only by using a slow tracking beam fire control. That is my only suggestion that I can see working, and it certainly might not. Spreading your ships out might allow you to lock up the missiles though, keeping all your ships a km or so appart won't cut it.
