Seeing as Battle Scanners take up a lot of space, is it a common strategy to design a ship type to act solely to scan enemy ship while the ships doing the actual fighting use the space for weapons instead? Then use only one of the scanning ships in combat and have it hang back while the other ships do the fighting?

Also, do you guys use automatic or manual combat?

EDIT: rereading the manual I see that battle scanners do more then just scan the enemy; they also give their ships +3 to initiative and + to hit.
So I guess my question is MoOt.