In that case though, what does that mean for my shields? It seems in this instance that it would mean I have 1600 shields, but that seems ridiculously high and as you say my shields are really too low to serve a purpose.
Shields are displayed as maximum strength - time to charge to full strength in seconds. Your current design would have a maximum defense of 4 points of damage every 400 seconds. Shields on smaller ships are pretty much useless until end levels tech, but they are magnificent on larger designs.
Guess I could drop the laser turrets and slap some more shields on it since the ship is basically designed to be support? The 15cm laser is a spinal laser, so only one can go on the ship.
My stance is the opposite. I like redundancy and multi-purpose designs.
As for my Gauss cannons, I can see and understand how the railgun at similar tracking speeds would be superior with my current tech, but wouldn't I need to turret it to get a decent tracking speed against enemy missiles? My new ship with better engines (as it stands) only operates at ~4000 kms, don't missiles tend to range much higher than that?
You can't turret railguns in the game at the moment. Steve, if I remember correctly, was on the fence about it. On one hand, all weapons should be turret-able for various reasons. The other, some of the weapons would make others obsolete if they were all able to be turreted. The line of thought was that there isn't much bonus to gauss rof 2 turrets tracking at 9,000km/s than there is to railguns that could track at ~3,500km/s.
My thoughts on the new design;
It seems a bit slow. Your engines should be between 30% and 40% of the mass of the ship, not 15%. 20 to 25% at the very least for specialized ships. Also, you should have matched your FC and turrets better. You should have restricted the laser turret to 6,000km/s, because it seems a lot of tonnage is wasted in turret gear for that single turret to be 23HS itself. Deployment time should be between 1 year and 18 months for military ships as I find you rarely surpass that when on campaign. Also, your fuel levels seem quite low as ships should be reaching 12b km as a very minimum, with 20+ as ideal.