A lot of the points I'd like to make have already been made it appears!
Nontheless, here's my two cents:
- Cerberus and Hound: Both fast and nimble for their weight and armour. Both have half-decent defences and both have a medium ballistic mount. You can say "Oh, the Cerberus is so much better armed than the Hound" but in response I'll simply direct you to Starsector's core files and point out the original sprite file for the Cerberus is called "superhound".
- Can you imagine fighting a pirate Buffalo MkII with even slightly capable shields? The pirates already managed to get ahold of an AM blaster which is bad enough!
- Shields are highly powerful tools in the game. Ships without them ARE balanced, but this doesn't just mean in combat. The Hound specifically, is also very cheap for its tonnage/speed/armament, and has one of the lowest deployment costs in-game, beaten only by the Kite and [one or two other ships I'm forgetting]. ALSO it is practically impossible to cause an unshielded ship to overload, for obvious reasons, which is actually a boon in combat.
- Don't forget that while the S/WP introduces the Shield Bypass, the stock game has a "Front Shield Generator" hullmod which allows you to stick a 90 degree front shield on any ship without one. One of my new favourite early-game support ships is a Hound with a front shield, heavy machine gun and vulcan cannon, plus whatever other mods I feel like at the time.