My thoughts so far.

Tips for Point Defense path. Energy Gat PD is extremely powerful on faster ships such as Afterthought,Cloudsave. If going with this path, you generally would have 25 pilots and go with Gatling Fighters which are very strong. The large Energy Gat is so-so and comes pretty late in the game, so I typically either grab Orb or whatever, or even stick with Laser, focusing on maxing the gat fighters and the PD Energy Gat first.
Note that you really need to set the PD Energy Gat target to LARGE, so all that firepower is not wasted on shooting fighters if something big is available to blast.