Fusion lance for aircraft.....pointless?

[odizzido]

Am I missing something? I usually just autoresolve the aircraft intercepts, even if they're not great.....but I am at the end of my second playthrough and I decided to take a look at aircraft weapons/fights more closely.

I am specifically talking about shooting down harvesters since they're the only UFO that can really do any damage on autoresolve. I did the math, it takes a gauss cannon 20% longer to take down a harvester UFO(maybe a little longer since it gets into range faster) but it has extra weight so you can only use one armour slot.

Reducing armour that much for 20% increased kill speed seems underwhelming considering I got gauss pretty much right at the start of the game and now I am at the end. Perhaps battleships have longer than 3 range on their 360 degree weapons which allows fusion lances to hit while being out of range? That's the only thing I can think of, but I've not seen any battleships yet.

 

I feel like I am probably just not seeing the benefit because I don't have enough experience in fighting air battles.....what am I not seeing?