On my most recent pass through Bearbaiting, I destroyed all four beams and was lining up for my first pass against the flak battery. I think I had just locked my Trebuchets when the Sathanas jumped. My average run has me taking out three beams and starting in on the last one before I have to get clear or get run over. The real trick seems to be knowing when to call for the supply ship and when to actually stop for it. I've not got the timing established yet, but I'm starting to believe it could be possible to knock out all four beams and the flak battery.
Of course, that's entirely off-topic... I seem to recall another one of these threads from a couple years back. Several other posts have established what the Colossus was and was not designed to fight, but I must add that the Colossus was designed to fight in a particular way. Like the Orion, the Colossus has the most threatening field of fire to the sides of the ship. As with older naval warships, it is designed to fire enormous salvos from its broadside into its target. End-on, it has very little stopping power, but if it 'crosses the T,' that is, turning perpendicularly across the path of a line of hostile ships (with similar turret configurations; I'm not talking Sathanases here), the smoke from the first ship won't have cleared before the last ship in the line is dead.
The Sathanas really is a special case. Given the out-of-the-box ships, the Sathanas is the only ship with the BFRed beam (christ, it'd be nice if we didn't have to pull names from the table file for beam cannons), and it has FOUR of them essentially sharing one firing arc. Really, if you use a head-on confrontation with a Sathanas as your measuring stick for a capital ship's quality, something tells me that even the Sathanas will suck. It's just an absurd metric.
Actually, now I'm curious to see exactly how long it takes one Sathanas to kill another, but that's not something to test at 2:40am. I'll crack open FRED tomorrow afternoon and give it a twirl. I've got a feeling that placing two ships and orienting them to face each other will take longer than the killing.
[edit]Tested the Sathanas against itself earlier today. Over several trials, one Sathanas cannot stand against another for much more than a minute.[/edit]