I've seen less than stellar performance from my CV's pulse lasers, not the turret ones, the mounted pulse lasers you can shoot pew pew style from the cockpit. I can unload literally hundreds of shots into a frigate's thruster and have seemingly no effect. None. Nada. And I'm not missing either. Is this because the weapon damage TYPE is inappropriate for that task? Is the thruster plume consuming the laser blast? LOL. If the answer to this is yes, where should I have been looking to confirm this information? Is it in game, or on a wiki? It seems like maybe the lasers do better shield damage, and the projectiles do better hull damage? While rockets do both? However the "better" in this statement seems to go from "works fantastically" to "literally does nothing" rather than "does normal damage" versus "does reduced damage". So it's tough to parse out. The wiki's I've found online do not have current information, which is understandable since the game has gone through so many changes. I'm not sure what info there is current and what is out of date. Maybe I'm looking at the wrong wiki. Anyway - I'm guessing rockets would be more functional, since explosion damage seems to be the only working damage mechanic in the game right now. And the lack of a CV sized railgun makes me sad. Unless that's another thing that I've managed to completely overlook...the artillery turret is a real big expensive adder right now that I'm not sure I want (although I may do it anyway since the lasers are almost useless).
You can look in the game files... .ecf or something like that, to see what kind of damage each kind of weapon does against each kind of block.