Do player owned ships still use lasertowers?

[GCU Grey Area]

Also fewer, bigger ships means less exposure overall to pirate attacks, so I get hassled a whole lot less by anxious freighter captains.

You can disable the notification in the personal tab where you set the default responses. Once you reach a certain stage it is kind of required since otherwise you would be alerted about a pirate every few seconds.

I know, however even late game have never needed to disable them. Those notifications occur at an entirely different rate when using L's predominantly. It's nowhere near 'every few seconds'. There just aren't that many pirate destroyers in the universe at any one time & they're the only things looking to steal from my trade fleet. Indeed those notifications can be really quite useful at times, indicating the location of a ship I might want to add to my fleet - Behemoth & Phoenix in particular are my favourite destroyers for demolition work (long range guns with a good rate of fire).