Here's my pet peeve with the autodesign. It will always pick particle PD, if available. If we presume the right-click chart on the lasers and particle weapons is correct, it's inferior, by a lot, to phaser PD which I also have available. I just use the autodesign as a convenient shortcut to populate ship with appropriate gear and modify to suit taste, I don't actually use the design as-is.
Phaser PD does 2.5 damage at any range every 2 seconds for 0.11GJ/shot and has a targeting range of 350km.
Particle PD does 0.8/0.5/0.3 damage depending on range every 4 seconds for 0.2GJ/shot and has a targeting range of 200km.
The only positive about the particle PD is that it's 3 tons vs phaser turret 20 tons but the huge difference in effectiveness more than negates that since the number of turrets is fixed, not based on mass.
Autodesign vs PD
Re: Autodesign vs PD
This is bit of a "can't you keep your mouth shut"-situation, but .. 
This fixation on particle PD appears to affect the xenos as well. They switch over from their effective Alien laser PD with orange lasers to Alien particle PD on new designs with violet lasers.
This completely tanks their PD effectiveness against kinetic shot, unless the particle beam has a hidden multiplier to the damage to slugs. Laser damage is apparently 1 point = 10kg evaporated.
This fixation on particle PD appears to affect the xenos as well. They switch over from their effective Alien laser PD with orange lasers to Alien particle PD on new designs with violet lasers.
This completely tanks their PD effectiveness against kinetic shot, unless the particle beam has a hidden multiplier to the damage to slugs. Laser damage is apparently 1 point = 10kg evaporated.