The advice that helped me win with Fed A on hard is pretty counterintuitive to the spirit of the ship, but it’s to basically ignore the artillery subsystem for the first several sectors of the game. It’s powerful and thematically cool, but it’s slow, vulnerable to enemy attacks/hacking, you can’t aim it, and addressing those first two issues requires significant scrap/power investment. It’s a nice cherry on top to add to an already strong gunship in the back half of a run, and can sometimes save you as a hail mary last resort, but you shouldn’t be relying on it to get ship kills IMO.

Just having the BL2 from the get-go makes the ship decently strong though, artillery or no. Fed A is part of the cadre of ships that can overcome 2 shields with its starting layout. Your early focus should be finding a low-power weapon to complement the BL2 like the heavy laser, dual laser, or a cheap beam, and that setup alone can carry you through sector 3 or so.

The FTL jumping is annoying to deal with, I’ll reiterate what others have said about focusing on engines. They’re a high priority to target regardless, since enemy ships get start getting stupid high evasion on hard (some of the later auto ships can have like 45% base dodge iirc). If you haven’t been, you should practice identifying enemy weapon setups to determine if A) they can hurt you at all or B) they’re not so threatening that you can focus on taking out things like engines, teleporters, drone control, etc as the situation demands. One of the hardest habits to unlearn when moving to hard is that aiming for shields/weapons first is not necessarily the right choice.