I bet you anything it's the weapon arc - most vanilla fighter weapons are fixed or have extremely small (5º) arcs - whereas most Blackrock fighters have 20º-30º weapon mounts. That means they can make a lot more marginal shots, and coupled with the burst-fire, higher projectile speed, and greater range, I could see that easily translating to a much higher average hit rate.
Now that BRDY includes a single-barrel Shredder, you can just swap it out in the files and see if halved firepower fixes anything.
That was indeed a very valuable post. It was not immediately clear how to swap out one Shredder for the other because it used an alphanumeric code for the weapon - I probably could have looked it up, but instead, I changed the default
51.3 degree arc to 5.13 degrees. That partially solved the problem. Not totally - it's now kind of middle-of-the-pack, or maybe in the bottom 3rd, when competing with 8-12 OP manned fighters. Still, a big improvement. Next I'll try switching it to the Light Shredder as well.
I think fighters are very sensitive to projectile speed, though, because it is on the same order as fighter speed, and relative to the fighters' velocity rather than absolute, but it doesn't seem like the "should I fire now" calculations are done accordingly. This is especially obvious for Warthogs armed with Light Mortars, which can't hit anything because it fires them while flying backwards and they simply don't make it to the target. So high velocity weapons might make fighters much more deadly for purely AI reasons. Sparks, with a sustained DPS of 64, don't seem particularly amazing on paper but they don't miss.
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