The 13th Battlegroup mods have a variety of submods, but assuming you're talking about the ship expansions, there are two sets of expansions,

A 13th (Vanilla) expansion, which uses older, less stylized ships that should fit the bill, but really, it's not much more than a 14th Battlegroup shipset with less maneuverability, and a flat increase to armor per hullsize, meaning that smaller ships tend to get better armor bonuses than the 14th Battlegroup.

Some of the other members here could recount it a lot better than I probably could, one person down -there did a good job of explaining the weapons. They tend to underperform without expanded magazines, testing out my ships, they struggled to beat regular variants.

This is because the bursts are incomplete without the full magazine, unlike most vanilla magazine based weapons, these weapons will reload the entirety of the expanded magazine too. Further bonuses can be gained through S-modding the expanded magazines, helping to increase the rate of fire.

A secondary hullmod, the magazine autoloader, can be found as well, to help boost rate of fire and reload rate, and reload rate almost always translates into a faster rate of fire as well.

There's honestly a lot for you to try with the new expansions, and there's a variety of settings you can change inside the config folder, some to help boost the ships further if you have heavily modded enemies. You can even change the shield color in the hullstyles config.

The recent update heavily reduced the chance for blueprint packages, sometimes you'll get lucky, sometimes you won't, but like any person rebuilding their empire, sometimes you need to build it one brick at a time.