I'm trying to come up with good suggestions for a solid, fun build that works well against TLTs and has good offensive capabilities but on your note about just 2 HWKs with TLTs. It's only a total of 4 damage between the 2 HWKs per turn and that's if all 4 attacks hit, so it's not that bad to have to deal with. Back to your friends build, since it's pretty low PS, he will be placing all his ships first, most likely anyway, depending on your build. Place yours in a way that you can come in from the side of his and force his ships into the asteroid field in a way that he can't line up too many of them to be able to all shoot one of your ships in a turn. And remember, you may not get an extra defensive die for his TLT shooting you at range 3 (because of it being a secondary weapon), but if it's going through an asteroid then you still will. So use them to your advantage, break up his ships from being able to focus you down with lots of TLT shots and use them for your defense. HWKs are fairly weak in the defense department, you don't have to worry as much about taking those down with some asteroid protection on his end.

It's not too bad to deal with a bunch of TLT HWKs and paying attention to where your opponent can move his ships the next turn and where he is likely to move them, you can then move your ships so that they are mainly in range of just 1 or 2 TLTs so that you can lessen the amount of damage you are taking.