Not sure if anyone else loves this game while sucking at piloting but if there are, is there a vanilla ship and loadout that you find easier to play with?
Falcon P with 2 medium sabot pods, two proximity mine launchers, 1 small sabot and 1 small reaper with Smod expanded missile racks and missile autoloaders and also safety overrides and converted hanger with Xyphos.
Firering both medium sabots instantly overloads most cruisers and smaller ships and then proxies are your main DPS to kill ships but they can also finish off shields if they didn't instantly overload and they swat fighters and missiles.
Against big high tech ships set the small sabot on autofire and it'll spam sabots to help the medium sabots overload them. Against big low tech ships, use your speed and maneuvering jets to get behind them to fire reapers and the proxies.
Reapers are also good against any ship that tries to avoid overloading by dropping shields when you fire the sabots.
The Xyphos are your PD that work even when you're overloaded and they disable ships for you.
With Falcon's high base speed, safety overrides, and maneuvering jets, you're one of the fastest things around so you can charge and run away easily.
Since you only have missiles and fighters, all your flux is dedicated to your shields so you're pretty tanky too.
Definitely get the combat endurance, target analysis, missile specialization and field modulation skills. Helmsman, ordinance expertise, crew training, tactical drills, coordinated maneuvers, and flux regulation are all also good.
This can kill pretty much anything 1 on 1 with ease. The only real issues are Paragons which can fortress shield your sabots, radiants which are strong, fast and tanky and star fortresses which have too many weapons and HP. One or multiple machine gun monitors with an eliminate order can tie them up enough though. Also, the Invictus has so much HP that it takes more than half your proxies and reapers to kill so best have other ships to help kill it.