I've been thinking about how minor things (in the grand scheme of things) could change design, doctrine, tactics, and even strategy, and the one thing I kept returning to when it came to ship design was how you could Min/Max your ships with regards to spinal weapons (at least in CT and MT, I really don't know about the others) and how that drove purely statistical design. So what happens to design when you remove them? I added Meson and PA bay weapons as well, though I doubt that they'd have much of an impact whether they were there or not when facing other large capital ships.