Finally got my LCOS working. Turns out that I needed to remove $Required Aspect from the tbm. So I learned something about modding.
I'm thinking of giving FREDding a try, but I'm not quite sure how to learn the autopilot feature. The standalone version of WCS comes with an autopilot template mission, but I'm not sure if that's just intended as a tutorial or if it's supposed to serve as a base from which to create any kind of mission with autopiloting. That might be kind of irrelevant, though, because I'm not sure the template mission works with the FSO version of WCS. When I try to open the template in FRED, I get an error message about an unrecognized operator in the AutoNav Initialize event. FRED says the error appears to be lock-controls, which I'm guessing is related to how this version of WCS does takeoffs and landings automatically. I don't know how big a deal that is. In any case, I think it would be helpful if there were a tutorial on how to set up an autopilot-ready mission from scratch. I can imagine it getting very tedious to have to remove irrelevant parts from the template every single time you want to make a mission.
Finally, a question about WCS for FSO itself: Is it intentional for the game to automatically deactivate the Auto Target feature whenever Strakhas cloak themselves? If so, I'd prefer if that were changed. It doesn't really add any additional challenge or anything, it's just annoying to have to constantly reactivate it. It would also be nice to bring back the system that makes the HUD flash blue when you're only taking shield damage, and flash red when you're taking hull damage.