First Fighter

[Iranon]

Well, you can add minimal armament - a minimal fire control and a reduced-size Gauss cannon, and you have the capability of slowly destroying defenceless ships for 0.6 HS.
The question is whehter you need that capability, or whether you'd rely on a proper beam fighter to do this. I assume dropships in other settings are meant to provide supporting fire for the groundpounders, in Aurora boarding combat is separate from space combat.
It seems more sensible to not waste tonnage in a highly stressed design where every bit of weight is expensive in terms of much-meeded performance.

I could see light weaponry useful as secondary armament for a microwave fighter: The main weapon disables the target, but for a very modest tonnage investment we circumvent the need for another ship type to deliver the kill. Or even on some missile fighters, as long as you don't bank on it being a viable combat weapon: fine if all you want is the ability to whittle down civilians or spent missile ships if an opportunity presents itself... but again the question arises whether we aren't better off mixing in some proper beam fighters.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

Wait, are we talking about fighters that attack ships or fighters that attack other fighters. I was talking about the latter. Is it not efficient to rely on space superiority fighters and to instead just use your ship's point defenses to take out enemy light craft?

Also, for bombers (I call small craft dedicated to taking out larger ships bombers to differentiate them from fighters) would it be okay to add a turret made from the smallest gauss gun I can make? Maybe this is me applying the rule of cool again (I want my space B-17) but it seems like a good idea in theory to fend of fighters or if nothing else anti ship missiles.

[Iranon]

Well, this isn't a real life navy where there's a huge difference between ships and airplanes.
Fighters have no unique advantages in beam combat except reduced-size fire controls (going much above 4x tracking speed is rarely practical)... which is negated by typically only having space for one light beam weapon each, while one fire control on a full-size ship may be good for 10 weapons. Their smaller sensor footprint is of little consequence because anything will pick you up before beam combat range.

The main advantage of beam-armed space superiority fighters over full-size beam ships is logistics - they're serviced in a hangar, and a new variant can get built immediately without shipyard retooling. For me, that's usually not enough, I  prefer full-size ships. But if you want beam-based space superiority fighters, they'll need to match their quarry in weaponry - a light "space superiority fighter" with light Gauss cannon armament may be crippled by the first laser shot of a fighter meant to go toe-to-toe with ships.

I think you really should decide whether you want to build efficient designs, or whether you want to build thematic equivalents from real life or other settings. There are many real-life analogues that work well (WW1 to cold war ships translate easily into the system, a dedicated nebula fleet may resemble an age-of-sail fleet). Other things don't work that well.
A Gauss turret on a bomber would not be very useful for fending off beam fighters, because the fighters would have longer weapon range. If the AI used fighters, which it doesn't.
If your bomber comes under fire from anti-ship missiles, why are you building a bomber instead of using more efficient full-sized ships?
If you want efficiency, identify needs, expected opposition, and a way to overcome it - inside Aurora mechanics, as other settings may work very differently.

[Ostia]

Personally, I would add ECCM (at least on an Energy Fighter). Lack of it ruined my day against spoilers (I was using HPM Fighters at that point, to breach Shields)