I'm on a roll. I give you...
The Bulwark Deceiver!What do you get when you cram a fighter-tight cluster of working bays in the heart of a cruiser hull, all centrally radiating out from a four-person medbay, then add a superweapon, and season to taste with six spread-out bays that open only onto space and have no mechanical connection to the heart of the ship?
You get the Bulwark Deceiver, that's what you get. Most of the working bays in this ship are 2x1; only the medbay, weapon bay, shield bay, and engine bay are 2x2. This ship is well-insulated from beam weapons and boarding parties/drones owing to the external, disconnected bays, which can soak up a beam by making it traverse useless, dense space on its way to the next room, and which serve as sinks for enemy boarding drones or parties to land in; and if the enemy which lands within it is a boarding party, you can summarily space them, leaving them to die gasping in ignorance, impotently unable to do any harm to your vessel or crew. (In fact, it is recommended for captains of Deceivers to leave these bays exposed to vacuum at all times.)
Of course, if a beam does originate in the heart of the ship and travel through it, as opposed to out towards one of the outlying bays, a lot of damage can happen very quickly, owing to the numerous, densely-packed bays, and if a boarding party does land inside the working spaces, getting rid of them may be a challenge, as the only airlocks inside the heart of the ship are single doors in the working bays that must be manned at all times. The upshot, of course, is that the legendarily sluggish Rockman crew have only a short distance to travel from wherever they may be working to the medbay, with only the pilot needing to stride more than three standard work areas to reach medbay.
The Bulwark Deceiver mounts a superweapon, like the Federation Cruiser. Like the Federation Cruiser, it targets randomly; unlike the Federation Cruiser, the weapon is not a shield-piercing artillery beam, but a mass driver that accelerates meteoroids. It can be upgraded three times, and for every two bar of energy being fed to the mass driver, it accelerates two small asteroids towards the enemy vessel when its loading time (25 seconds) is up. The Mass Driver is also unlike the Artillery Beam in that it benefits from having a skilled gunner at the controls. Just like ordinary asteroids, though, it can miss.