[The E]

Look at TBP's WhiteStar. Player-controlled beams certainly are possible, but take some ai-profiles tweaking to work correctly.
More specifically, look at the Neutron beams' #player variant. It's a beam with basically no warmup or cooldown period, so it can be fired like most other primaries. For another example, the Nial's primaries are very beam-like.

[starlord]

well, the WC fighter weapons work the same, so perhaps saga has some plans to work out with this (they already are working on uneven armour for fighters).

example: the neutron gun is close range, and damage diminishes with distance (in the WC games), very much like the EPC. the NPC is the contrary...