For beam special effects, you basically have a choice between oversized for that little damage increase or thermal vent to alleiviate your own heat issues.
I personally like to twin the small hardpoints on my corvette with the huge ones as they have very similar firing arcs and good convergence, giving them the same mount type (gimbal/fixed, same weapon type and similar engineering mods). Considering their smaller size, they also make for a good target for utility effects such as emissive and scramble spectrum. If you are using long-range mods on your huge hardpoints, giving the smaller hardpoints focused also works pretty well as an alternative as they benefit a lot from the improved penetration and it helps spread your material requirements out a bit rather than requiring loads of particular mats.
Alternatively, if you use big game hunting weapons such as PAs on the class 4s, then equipping the small hardpoints as a secondary small ship hunting kit with overcharged/rapid fire gimbal weapons also works pretty well. This setup I also find to be quite intuitive to use, as it presents the traditional primary/secondary weapon sets (like a tank's turret with the cannon as the primary to use against other tanks while softer targets you would use the coaxial machine gun on).
I've not used them personally, but I've heard pretty good things about mounting Cytoscramblers on the class 1 slots. They are pretty much the best shield stripper in the game if you close to short enough range to overcome the jitter, and the jitter renders the short range mod effectively zero-drawback as they aren't useful past 500 metres anyway.
The side mounts I like to equip for turret duty as they have some wide firing arcs and the convergence is a pain for normal mounts for them. Being medium slots, they are responsive enough to track most targets pretty well while also being able to put out a bit of damage. I've not quite figured out what is best on them though (particularly with special effects), but I prefer to use some kind of energy weapon as turrets tend to eat through ammunition pretty quickly. Turrets aren't really about maximum damage, but instead for keeping pressure on targets (stopping shield regen and making AI perform continual evasive maneuvers) while also tagging enemies for extra combat bonds, so don't feel bad about putting utility effects onto them (such as emissive or scramble spectrum).
The underside's large mount has really awkward firing arcs and convergence when using it alongside the topside weapons, so I tend to either use it as a 3rd turret (often undersized down to medium for better tracking, plus then I don't need to worry about the logistics of having large turrets as I mount medium turrets on a fair few of my ships) or as my utility weapon slot that isn't meant to be used alongside other weapons. Being a large slot, you would want more damage focused utility weapons, such as running LR PAs for sniping, but it could be repurposed for one of your Imperial Hammers with Feedback Cascade to deal with those pesky shield cells. With recent additions, I'd imagine that it would work well as a seeker missile or torpedo mount, but I've not tried them yet.
For the different laser types, they all have their uses. Bursts are very efficient on paper, offering a pulse lasers efficiency with significantly increased damage, but are a bit of a pain to use and don't benefit properly from increased rates of fire (it only affects time between bursts, not the burst itself, so they benefit less than other weapons). Beams do a lot of damage and usually look damn cool, but are relatively inefficient which practically necessitates the efficient mod if you are trying to use them for damage in normal combat. Pulses are efficient and generally spammable, plus their good scaling with rapid fire makes them a good carrier for applying special effects. When it comes down to efficient beams vs overcharged pulses as a general purpose beatstick, the beams generally a much stronger stat-wise (offering more DPS for less energy and heat) although they can be fiddly to use as they require continual time on target while pulses can be used more precisely, I personally like the beams as I often used gimbals but it does come down to personal preference a bit; burst lasers generally combine both the strengths and weaknesses of beams and pulses, with high power draw, damage and difficulty of use but with high efficiency and it is also worth noting that huge bursts have a very long delay between shots in a burst which exacerbates this issue further.
