Under the suggestion of Horizon, I'm presenting my idea for determining how many dice battery weapons use when rolling to damage vs the armor of a ship.
Instead of the gunnery table, and using column shifts for abeam/closing/type of target/distance. We incorporate this information into the base profile of the ships themselves.
Using a new entry for each ship, called evasion (I dont like this word for reasons you'll see too, maybe target as a replacement). Standard cruisers would be the standard to base this stat on.
Thus (as an example for showing the mechanic, not a balanced final value) for a standard cruiser it would have +1F/-1S/0R. +1 evasion in the front, -1 for the side (or abeam), and 0 for the rear. Compared to an escort, which would have 0F/-2S/-1R for its evasion values.
What does evasion do? It subtracts or adds the number of dice you roll for each battery weapon that is firing at the ship from the corresponding arc. Evasion also allows you to incorporate things like holofields (just add higher evasion), or any other mechanic that would make a ship harder or easier to hit. Weapons that always count as closing would of course always use the front evasion value.
Next for the weapons themselves. Break each battery weapon into range bands of effectiveness. A 60cm weapon battery at strength 10, would be rewritten as 0-15cm st7, 16-30 st5 31-60cm st4. If it had something that allowed it to ignore a right shift for range in the current rules, then it would be 0-5cm st7 16-60cm st5.
In this sort of rule set, I wouldent expect people to memorize the range bands of things, but evasion values being fairly standardized would be easier to remember, and would not present a difficult way to modify the strength of the weapon when you check the range band. I also think that it would not be more difficult to do this system for a new player, than would using the gunnery table.
As an example, a squad of 2 escorts shoot at a cruiser both are in the 16-30 range, at st3 since they're the same type of escort. One is in the rear (evasion 0) another abeam (evasion -1) so 3+0 and 3-1 dice are rolled for a total of 5 dice, and you hit vs armor as you normally would.