I find Pirate Lairs to be one of the most obnoxious elements ever added to the game, they take forever to clear early game unless you invest a ludicrous amount into early game ships to get the manpower over to drive them out. Anyone know how to tweak them to give them less manpower to defend with so you can actually get rid of them before the inevitable heat death of the universe? Thinking something like 100 + 100 per Level.

Hello :)

Try to add Siege Modules to your ships' loadout: it should make quick work of their Manpower!

Hope this helps!

So in a game where one of the main complaints is that it forces you towards excess militarization, the solution so a problem that requires more militarization is to invest even further into militarization...

Or I could just disable them because turning my colony ships into seige weapons strikes me as perhaps a critical failure of a system.

You could always whine about it instead. Oh... wait, I guess you've tried that already.