I'm not sure you can make non x-ray bomb pumped laser. From my understanding, the nuclear explosion is what makes the x-rays and there are focusing rods that do their best to focus those x-rays into coherent beams before dying themselves.

It's not like a normal laser with a lasing medium and all that stuff

Two 80k-ton "Ruin" class battleships steamrolled 1.4M tons of enemy fleet in the area around their homeworld. The enemy was one generation behind behind in engine tech but otherwise reasonably at parity. One of the two battleships took significant armor damage and some minor internal damage toward the end of the fight because I was too impatient to retreat and allow shields to recharge from the sanding of Size 1 AMMs.

Some takeaways: The enemy fleet did not use shields, which made our particle lances devastating. Our shields easily tanked significant volleys of ASMs, which the railguns and our own AMMs helped pare down. Ran out of AMMs pretty quickly despite having a 5kt magazine full of Size 1 AMMs, so in the future I might reduce the qty of AMMs and increase the qty of railguns, and/or add some small turreted lasers to add FAC/fighter defense and defend against laser-warhead ASMs. Having my civilian tugs bring these ships to the system enables the use of high-power low-efficiency engines, making these battleships easily outpace any tech-parity foes, which in turn enables us to control the range for beam engagement and, using particle lances/beams, out-hit them in DPS at range or stay entirely outside their effective range.

The next phase is ground assault of the homeworld, which is going to suck. I can "see" a quarter million tons of troops, and it's a forested rift valley, which means a TON more troops are in there. I'm going to need many millions of tons of troops to take this world, specialized infantry and lots and lots of logistics.

DN Pegasus  (Ruin class Dreadnought)      79,935 tons       2,856 Crew       20,069 BP       TCS 1,599    TH 15,000    EM 32,130
9382 km/s      Armour 10-165       Shields 1071-476       HTK 479      Sensors 22/16/0/0      DCR 90-11      PPV 310
Maint Life 1.38 Years     MSP 13,776    AFR 1278%    IFR 17.7%    1YR 7,864    5YR 117,964    Max Repair 1,875 MSP
Troop Capacity 1,000 tons     Magazine 1,740 / 0   
Rear Admiral (Lower Half)    Control Rating 5   BRG   AUX   ENG   CIC   FLG   
Intended Deployment Time: 12 months    Morale Check Required   

Ion Drive  EP3750.00 (4)    Power 15000.0    Fuel Use 246.48%    Signature 3750.00    Explosion 30%
Fuel Capacity 7,000,000 Litres    Range 6.4 billion km (7 days at full power)
Epsilon S119 / R476 Shields (9)     Recharge Time 476 seconds (2.3 per second)

Particle Lance-12-40s (10)    Range 240,000km     TS: 9,382 km/s     Power 37-5    ROF 40       
Particle Beam-6-15s (20)    Range 240,000km     TS: 9,382 km/s     Power 15-5    ROF 15       
10cm Railgun V20/C3 (10x4)    Range 20,000km     TS: 9,382 km/s     Power 3-3     RM 20,000 km    ROF 5       
BFC R256-TS8800 (2)     Max Range: 256,000 km   TS: 8,800 km/s    ECCM-2     96 92 88 84 80 77 73 69 65 61
BFC R256-TS7600 (SW) (3)     Max Range: 256,000 km   TS: 7,600 km/s    ECCM-2     96 92 88 84 80 77 73 69 65 61
Magnetic Mirror Fusion Reactor R76-PB10 (2)     Total Power Output 151.7    Exp 7%
Magnetic Mirror Fusion Reactor R42 (1)     Total Power Output 42.3    Exp 5%

S1 Missile Launcher (40)     Missile Size: 1    Rate of Fire 10
MFC FC6-R5 (20)     Range 6.9m km    Resolution 5   ECCM-1

MD1284k-250t (1)     GPS 80     Range 14.3m km    MCR 1.3m km    Resolution 1
EM2-16 (1)     Sensitivity 16     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  31.6m km
Thermal Sensor TH2-22 (1)     Sensitivity 22     Detect Sig Strength 1000:  37.1m km

Electronic Warfare Jammers:   Fire Control 2    Missile 3   

Apologies if this has already been covered, but this thread is now 27 pages long, so while I didn't find my suggestions via a couple searches, they might be there already.

First, right now if you're checking a research project field (e.g. Defensive Systems) ongoing projects in that field are coloured blue for ease of reference. This is awesome. Can we get projects in queue also coloured the same blue in that instance?

Second, less important, but if we click on an ongoing project or something in queue, could we have a similar highlight (either the same colour, overriding the first case, or a different colour if preferred) calling out everything in the same queue, including the current project if that isn't what was clicked?

This would make parsing multiple research queues visually easier.

Do STOs offer PPV, or no?

It would be nice if when selecting "Refuel" from a colony or hub, there was an option to select the number of Liters desired, similar to how you can set a minimum distance when selecting "move to".  Often I run into fuel shortages and trying to ration the production between all ships is pain because as it stands, when told to refuel ships will take the colony reserve down to zero.  You can then unload the fuel back down to the ships minimum set in the class designer, but that gets annoying quickly.