Yeah the dish was fixed as this is a new model
Im going to texture the weapons on, im sure weapons on tos ships just look like spheres dont they, in the mirroe universe ent episode when archer blows up the tholian asteroid base with the defiant, the rear weapon came out of the sphere above the shuttle bay on the end of the aft hull.. so i will probably go with that i think.
To my knowledge, which I'm not saying I'm an expert, TOS Fed weapons are behind panels. Gene didn't want to make the military part of the design to be prominent. The Defiant was a pure war design though. No point in concealing it's weapons. By TMP though the weapons were in full display anyhow.
The "sphere" where the rear firing weapons came from on Enterprise I think was the shuttle homing beacon, wasn't it? I didn't see it, but i read that.
Pulse phasers, are a function of 1st generation X-phasers in SFB (which SFC is based on). That function wasn't coded into SFC though. Instead they went with the overload function, which was dropped in SFB. Go figure.
I'd go with x-tech myself though. X-phasers, heavy photons, and if you'd like to have pulse phasers you can go with a couple of phaser Gs, possibly. Pretty nice model overall though. Good to have you here, man. More TOS please.