A raider can last a surprising amount of time if you don't go overboard on the weapon as you have plenty of spare energy. I've had success with no hard point on the front and two quad lasers on the back. Many turns you won't need to fire twice with the quads so they often don't need to suck energy to be ready for the next turn. With an engineering team and the shield title you can recover 5 shields practically every round you need to, so if less than 5 ships have you in arc (remembering you're a huge ship so you move last) you can recover for greater benefit than reinforce. That's a cheap base to start from and as as much or as little as you need. I kinda think weapons engineer is essential, backup generator is useful as hell as you'll usually have emerged on this ship, gas supplies are great for a huge shield boost when you need it and captain needa makes flying the raider a lot less stressful.

In a note about escorts tho I agree they're as important to your raider build as the actual upgrade cards on your raider. Blocking is important here as your escorts main job is to buy time for the raider to blow ship up. As a good rule of thumb you can't go wrong with 5 ties as an escort. I've had am good success running three ties with a onyx defender with an ion cannon. So far he has four kills from ioning people into the raiders path. And as all who play epic regularly know, the aim of epic is not to win, it's to crush more ships to death than your opponent can!