So after a few days of playing the game I finally decided to read some guides and make a ship with actual planning. I came up with this, it costs around 1.5 million and can beat most ships up to 2.5/3mil (the ace is still the ace) with minimal damage to the internals and both lasers intact.
I'm not sure if this is already used by some people but I had the idea to use 2x1 armor on top of the main armor, which intercepts missiles and stops splash damage/EMPs from reaching the main armor and internals. This allows it to take very little damage from most weapons (that aren't railguns, lasers, etc.) because shots that don't land in the front armor are diffused away from the surface. I would have added this to the front but I chose cosmetics over function (not sure if I'll keep it that way). By doing this it not only saves half the money for outer layers and makes pd and the related reactors/crew much less important.
It's not very fast, and the interior is nothing but armor except for the individual systems which each have at least 1 block between them. The beams are 100% uptime to the extent of my testing, I left them running for 6 minutes before I stopped timing them and left them running for most of the time I spent making it. I might fix them in place to add more barrel protection, at the moment they work independently to avoid overkilling parts but sometimes the ship only keeps one in line with the target. Otherwise, does anyone have any advice on things to fix/things to keep in mind for future designs?