I updated my build based on suggestions from a reddit thread and the original thread here on Lemmy and the build is now fully combat effective in its role as an AFK ship.
The main changes were:
*Reducing the max range of the lasers to prevent unnecessary distributor drain due to turret jitter. Effective range about 4800 m, which is still plenty.
*Addition of two beam lasers for more DPS.
*Replacing many of the guardian shield boosters with engineered hull reinforcement and some more module reinforcements.
*0A shield booster engineering and biweave shield readjusted for additional thermal resistance.
*Large increases in resistances across the board for shields and hull. More robust hull strength. The additional damage resist definitely helps with survivability and seems to have the biggest effect compared to my previous build.
*SLF pilot skill increased to Deadly.
*Engineered G5 Dirty Drag drives to help with turn rates when I do want to play actively.
*Two points defenses instead of 3, additional ammo engineering, on bottom to protect cargo hold. Appears to be sufficient.
*When I want to go somewhere, I swap one of the G5 module reinforcements with a G6 fuel scoop in the Size 6 slot.
With these changes I am able to, with proper massacre mission stacking, take on multiple Threat 8 missions at once. The best I’ve been able to get so far was 400 million credits across 20 missions (about 175 kills total) per run. Due to the very fast spawning from the high threat enemies it only took a few (two hours) to complete, with an additional 40 minutes for quest pickup and turn-in.
When playing actively, I usually just turn to focus all weapons on enemies and sic my fighter on enemies after scanning them. For shielded Anacondas I try to stay behind them either above or below to prevent all of their weapons from aiming at me. Otherwise I can just stay still and turn to enemies as needed.
Other settings I ran with:
*3 pips shield, 0 pips engine, 3 pips weapons. If playing actively I can get away with 2/0/4.
*Report crimes against me set to ON to get some additional help from system authorities. Definitely helps with shielded anacondas and multiple simultaneous waves.
*3-5 km away from center of Low Haz area, either above or below, about 300-600 m away on the Z axis.
*SLF set to Defend.
*No additional AFK rotation (weight on the rotation key) appears to be needed as SLF does a good job now.
*Cheap cargo (biowaste is fine, lol when pirates want my biowaste). I try to jettison and replace with Occupied Escape Pods to be a juicer target and also add additional income on quest turn-in.
I’m very happy with how this build performance now, but it does require a bit of setup effort and is engineered to the n-th degree.