Well you see when my pulse laser fires (automatically for some reasons and can't see how to turn it off) it uses 20% flux. So when my outgoing flux is 20% letting me shoot a mere 5 times and the damage to the tiny ship I'm shooting is 15%....you can see how we have a problem. In effect, it only has to absord five hits on me, i flux and he ganks me.
This is one hour into the game.....
7 ships tested over multiple simulations. All destroyed.
Look in the top right of the refit screen. Ships can be upgraded with flux capacitors and vents, which will give them more power on the field. Hit those happy (+) markers, they're one of the most important things to put on a ship.
Thanks I'll try that. However is the gun uses more flux than deals damage it seems to be a gun that i don't want to be using.
If you match your identical ship up against an identical ship in the simulator and then let the ai control your ship, it'll win about 50% of the time.
AKA
Either you're matching weaker ships against stronger ships.
OR
Most likely you're just a much worse pilot than the ai is, so if you want to play the game, and enjoy the campaign, but don't feel like training your fingers to "get good" at piloting? Well all you have to do is let the autopilot control your ship in normal campaign play. In fact you can play this game a bit like a tactical with pause strategy game. You never actually need to control even your own flagship, you can leave it on autopilot in battles.
If you can't learn the hotkeys, you won't become a good pilot, which is fine, again, you can play this game like a tactics game with pause and the admiral overlay menu in combat.
Now since other people have guessed you're using a wolf, I will mention, the wolf actually has quite a high skillcap for piloting, because it has missiles that are likely to be deadfire AND it has a maneuvering active skill. You can charge a wolf directly at a larger ship and use it's skimmer (while locked on target) to instantly warp behind an enemy ship and turn to face it and be able to unload a salvo into it's engines before it can position it's shields to cover itself. The wolf is a hit and run ship. A ship that's useful at very quickly winning 2on1's in a large battle, even against larger targets. The downside for a wolf though is that it's made of tissue paper and it's speed is actually only mediocre (when you don't take the skimmer into account).
I've seen streamers and let's players who have 50+ hours in the game pilot a wolf worse than the ai can. That said larger ships? Are simpler for the player to pilot and benefit more from player piloting. The ai is very good at flying it's ship (things like staying at the right range and aiming), but very bad at knowing strategically how to win a battle (hammer+anvil or simply 2v1'ing as many matchups as possible as fast as possible).