Pain with short range weapons.

So the weapons of SE can be pretty safely sorted into 2 categories.

Soft and hard weapons.

Soft having gatlings, autocannons, and rockets.

And hard having assault cannons, artillery, and railguns.

My problems are with the "Soft" category.

For example. If I wanted to take a couple of fighters and attack literally anything that moves. Who would win? Literally anything that moves.

This is because literally anything that moves can simply go backwards and be completely immune to all soft weapons. Even assault cannons if it is able to react quickly enough. This kinda sucks. Even against things like a gunship where a fighter SHOULD be effective, it is completely useless because if the person flying the gunship has a pulse then they can just move away until they can get to a safe location.

I have 2 solutions.

1. Increasing the range of soft weapons. It would be nice to see them go out to 2000 or 1400 if you were deadset on keeping them weaker for progression scaling (don't get me wrong I love you guys but if this is your reason you need a better one) then you could do 1200 or 1000.

2. Make small grids faster. If small grids had a physically higher speed cap than large grids (probably 110 or 120) then it would allow them to close the distance on targets they wanted to pursue while allowing enough time for a large grid ship to travel to a safer location where the fighters would have to break off or enough time for a jump drive to finish charging.

Things like drones and missiles would still be weak here because they would just travel in a relatively straight line and could be picked off while closing the distance. This would also give an incentive to make things like personal shuttles and small personell carriers because they could travel faster over planets and short distances.