That's how the ships on PI are, makes combat more intense and makes capital ships still combat effective if they lose their beam cannons. 
Yeah but TBH they look quite strange. A long line of blobs travelling slowly like that...
Well, I play with the $FOF value, and I didn't like the result. Putting a value greater than 2, I have blobs every where. It's like playing a hardcore japanese shoot'em up. And about the speed, just increase the $Velocity

Since, I doubled the speed of each ships (except cruiser)/missiles/primary guns, I have a pretty good result.