I am indeed talking about Circular Area Probability. For various reasons, other than Beams, shots are inherently inaccurate, even if fired by an AI that has calculated where your ship "should" be at the time the shot arrives. Add in random noise, and the CEP gets larger.
Small, fast ships have very large CEPs compared to large, slow-moving ships and get missed quite often at long ranges (anything over 700 in Vanilla); hence why the Tempest, and to some extent the Wolf, are outliers statistically, when we talk about ships the AI uses inherently better than others. It's not just the CEP difference that matters, though; a Tempest can disengage and Vent at will, too, which makes it entirely unlike most of the ships in the game. The Tempest would best be fixed, balance-wise, as an individual case by cutting its base speed a little bit; it'd need to cost less to deploy, etc., then, of course, because that's such a huge stat and it would be nothing like as dangerous if it wasn't able to out-run practically everything and out-gun almost everything a size class larger, too, if we include the Drone.
The level 10 Power Grid Modulation drains Hard Flux; it turns a nonrenewable resource into a renewable one. I feel like this is a very poorly understood buff. I like that buff, but it needs to be understood properly; in a fleet context, it means many thousands of DPS difference between my fleet and yours before my average fleet member is Flux-locked, all else being equal.
When we're talking AI-on-AI in a fleet battle, Flux-lock is pretty much the end; a ship in that position rarely survives much longer. It's not like a player-vs-fleet duel, where the enemy gets to Vent while hiding behind their buddies; in most cases, everybody gets pincered at some point... except for ships like the Medusa and Tempest, who are too fast for that to happen, or have abilities that prevent it most of the time.