[Venicius]

I'm very new to FREDing and can't  get the capital ships to fire their beam weapons.  All they want to use are their non-beam weapons. 

[General Battuta]

So, you might want to go through the FRED tutorial.

You can manually beam-free individual ships using the beam-free-all SEXP. You can lock beams and command individual turrets to fire on demand using fire-beam.

Lastly, if you want uncontrolled beam fire, go to 'mission specs' and tick 'all ships beam-freed by default.'

[Dragon]

Be advised that "all ships beam-freed by default" is an SCP feature. (you must have FS2 Open to use it)

[headdie]

in addition to the above posts If you are running a 3.6.9 or later version of SCP there should be a flag in the
EDITORS - MISSION SPECS window

[Dragon]

That's exactly "all ships beam-freed by default" flag we were talking about.

[General Battuta]

What Dragon said.

[Venicius]

Oh, found it.  Thanks!

[Snail]

Have fun with your Battle of Endor missions...