I've noticed that my frigates tend to pass extremely close to larger ships while making their attack runs, getting themselves killed far more often than they should. This seems to happen most frequently against high-tech ships that don't have many blind spots in weapons coverage, such as the Aurora or Apogee. Unless a frigate has exclusively long range weapons (ex. the Wolf-class close support with its graviton beam and three tactical lasers), they get so close to enemy capital ships that they nearly bump shields with their target. Against the Apogee's pulse lasers or the heavy blasters of the Aurora, this often ends with a quick shield overload and explosive death. Even ships like the Tempest, which has a graviton beam for long-range fighting, prefer to dash into pulse laser range against capital ships instead of remaining at a distance. Is there a quirk in the frigate AI that prevents them from accounting for the wider weapons coverage of some ships, or does this happen because some ships are simply better equipped to deal with frigates? I rarely have this problem when fighting low tech ships like the Onslaught, since most of its weapons face forward and its turning speed is abysmal.
Additionally, the explosions from dying capital ships do a ludicrous amount of damage to nearby unshielded ships and claim the lives of many brave frigate captains. While playing a campaign yesterday, my small fleet (my Medusa flagship, a Wolf, a Tempest, and a few wings of Broadswords/Piranhas) ambushed a damaged Apogee cruiser, the sole survivor of a large battle between some mercenaries and the Tri-Tachyon. I saved right before the battle in case I didn't capture the cruiser (I REALLY wanted an Apogee). I reloaded the save around ten times and lost a frigate in two or three of the battles; the Apogee stood no chance of winning (it never survived for longer than a minute), but my ships passed so close to the dying cruiser that the explosion disabled them as well. Do frigates not account for the possibility of their target exploding violently while their nose cone is lodged firmly in its engines, or did the cruiser just die too quickly for them to fly clear of the blast radius? If the latter is true, the deaths of my frigates are my own fault -- overloaded capital ships do not last long when hit by four Atropos torpedoes and a full load of Piranha bombs in the exact same spot.
In case you are wondering, I never did capture that Apogee. It turns out that 33 marines are not enough to successfully board a captured cruiser.