The viper is a fantastic medium fighter. To be compared to a ship with significantly better mobility, over double the shields, and over double the firepower.... no. The Vulture is way out of the Viper's league in every way except for speed in a straight line. Skill is not something thay needs to be brought up to compare ships... it's a metric that is different for everyone. While I agree an Elite viper can kill a Competent vulture, it doesn't necessarily mean its a better ship. When I am killing novice Anacondas it's not like I think that the Anaconda sucks...
If a Viper pilot and a Vulture pilot 1v1'd the winner would be the one with more fixed weapons. If the Viper was all fixed vs an all gimballed Vulture, the Vulture would probably try to run away. But if tables were flipped where the Vulture is all fixed, I would feel like the Viper may not survive fleeing while the shields on the Vulture would.
Sure, on paper there are obvious differences. I find that people in larger more powerful ships tend to try the sucker shot approach more than anything though because the difference in alpha damage makes smaller ships like a viper seem like a larger version of the sidewinder. A well timed shot can strip the shields off a viper almost instantly.
The mistake many people in larger ships make though is in thinking that paper specifications will translate into nothing but win against other human players. One thing you ignored in your truthful assessment of firepower though is the relative fragility of various subsystems (which I think i something that will be fixed over time). It's much easier to defeat one subsystem on a large ship than the entire vessel, so I never try to overpower it in my viper because that would be stupid.
The sustained level of damage I can deal out with 2 beams and 2 cannons is a lot more than the scatter shots I get in return.
The other thing I see few pilots do effectively is make aggressive use of speed changes and thrusters to make the ship do things it shouldn't be able to do on paper. All of our ships want to fly more or less in straight lines and in a partially newtonian galaxy we can use inertia to our advantage. Don't let your speed get stuck in the blue zone, but consider it more like being in frameshift where your actual speed is always changing as the counter to a destination is stuck at 6 or 7 seconds.
If I put it this way it might be easier to make sense: My thrust might be at max for 4 seconds while I'm turning and using counter-thrust to pull my nose over faster, then my thrust will drop to zero or even a little reverse to counter the inertia and keep my guns pointed at an enemy ship a little longer....if he's smart he's already pulling out out my optimal targeting area and I can continue to reverse or hit afterburners, +2 pips to engines to recharge for 3 seconds, and reset my orientation depending on where he is on my map. If he manages to get behind me, then hit the chaff, slow down for 2 seconds and use thrusters only to change my ship orientation before hitting burners.
It wasn't quite the same thing but I used to fly a lot like that in Freespace 2 where dogfights could end up in neverending loops until I showed my clan how to draw figure-8's in 3 dimensions so the enemy players never knew where the outside of the 8 was going to be.
The bottom line is a lot of people get stuck on shooting and forget to use most of the other controls...
