RR16, I strongly disagree with regard to your statement that armour and firepower always win over manoeuvrability. The armour advantages that the designers gave to the some ships compared to other ships of the same class are so marginal that it takes only a small fraction of second to burn that extra armour away with gunfire (about one tenth of a second). The more agile ships generally have less armour than comparable ships of normal or lesser manoeuvrability but the agility more than compensates this minuscule disadvantage.
A few ships have an extra forward-firing hardpoint (read: firepower) compared to other fighters of the same type and class, but it takes a lot of skill to make this advantage outweigh the manoeuvrability advantage that some other fighters of the same type & class have. Whichever way you look at this, the advantage boils down to having just a single gun more and this is not a whole lot.
And the Sabre is hampered by the simple fact that turrets have 700 m/s speed but all 700 m/s guns
drain energy. The notorious no-drain guns have 600 m/s speed, and this difference matters quite a lot in a dogfight against an agile ship like the Eagle - either the slow guns hit or the fast ones, but rarely both.
The only reasons I fly ships other than Patriot and Drake is that it takes these ships so bleeding long to fry high-level ships without resorting to very expensive mines, and that they cannot use torpedoes but I like the satisfying boom (and the resulting damage) when a well-launched Starkiller torpedo hits home.
I agree with NukeIt's statement that it is difficult to find equally-skilled players that are not also biased towards the combat styles associated with LFs (agility dominant) on one hand or HF/VHF/Fr (firepower dominant) on the other. And I bow before DragonBreath who flew difficulty 43 missions in a Defender.
P.S.: I must disagree with NukeIt's remark regarding freighter pilots. On one hand freighter combat is more challenging than HF/VHF combat because freighters cannot use torps and have a slight manoeuvrability disadvantage, but on the other hand even the lowly Rhino has more loot storage capacity than the most expensive HF/VHF. And the fabulous Dromedary combines
a lot of firepower with the biggest loot storage capacity known to man (in the unmodded game, of course).
Edited by - Sherlog on 12-09-2003 00:24:40