Thanks for the feedback on the ship - some of that I knew and made sub-optimal choices for flexibility reasons, but it was still very useful. The fire control point in particular is something I will be changing in future designs (for several different ships, actually).
Forget the Autofire and stick with manual override of the PD firecontrol. The reason being that the AI is not sophisticated enough(at present) for the level of control you appear to be looking for. If and when Steve builds a means of assigning player controlled decision tree protocols for autofire then you may get the control your looking for.
AI coding is indeed very difficult (I'm a programmer) - I'm just trying to understand why the ships are behaving
differently. I actually WANT them to autofire on stuff (guarding a jump point), since that's faster than trying to get them to fire manually (low training) and their range is so lousy.
Anybody have any ideas what else could be differentiating the ships??