Oh, almost forgot: get rid of the phaser types as soon as you can. Disabling weapons sounds nice but it doesn't happen often enough or for long enough. If you can get 'em, tetryon weapons eat shields for breakfast.
Tetryon Procs do not scale with level, iirc. Phasers do. (Everything but plasma and tets does, I believe; one of the reasons plasma is cheaper than phasers at high levels.) In fact this is terrible advice since phasers have a chance to disable any subsystem (shields, weapons, engines, aux) and the hilarity of seeing somebody's shield system crash two seconds before the inbound torpedoes hit should always be experienced at least once. This matters less to escorts because they rarely fight extended battles, but it can still be quite noticeable.
Mixing weapons does not directly hurt you. The power drain is a consequence of firing any energy weapon and cannot be avoided. Rather, you get more damage out of having a standardized battery and the type-specific tac consoles to support it.
Torps on the front of an escort, I'm told, depend on having torp skills in your bridge officers. (I'm beginning to suspect the use of torps in general, once you get up to Captain and beyond, could be described that way.) If you have Spread or High Yield they're an excellent addition if managed well.
Turrets are useful mainly to escorts because they can fire frontally with the front guns and are also cannons, meaning that your bridge officer cannon skills work on them too. I don't see too many other ships mounting them.
Ah, okay, thanks for clearing that up, especially about the energy drain bit. I had assumed that the "-xx power when firing other weapons" was there to discourage mixing weapon types, since I figured that it would be pretty obvious that firing weapons explicitly uses weapon system energy and the tooltip didn't need to point that out. The tooltip description is pretty vaguely worded.
Also, thanks for pointing out that tetryon/plasma procs don't scale. That's...disappointing, to say the least. I definitely have started to notice that torps are getting much less useful unless I'm using them in incredibly specific situations after boosting with a spread/HY; thankfully, my XO and tac officer has both (I'm an engineer).
Apologies for the misguided advice, then, that necessitated correction. I feel suitably chastised.
