the ships are balanced time wise for time trial, that is for sure. I would like to see them balanced for ARcade race/mulitiplayer instead. The ships need to be balanced for one or the other I am starting to learn. Noone will take a piranha into a multiplayer tourney, and even have a prayer against 3 high acceleration ships (with equal pilots). It's race over within about 10 seconds, after you hit the entire slew of mines,bombs. Even though in Time trial the ships come out to about the same time (phantom) over a 5 lap race, why in the hell would you ever choose an Piranha or Triakis, when they are much harder to pilot to get those times. There has to be a reason to pilot the faster ships, meaning they actually need to be faster, and have a chance to win after the first 10 seconds. Because even if the faster ships somehow catches up by lap 4 (both ships racing perfectly with no weapon hits), they had to race considerably better to get there due to the loose handling, and they still have a much higher chance to hit the wall after that. Even using an Triakis in pure against 4 other competitors has a disadvantage, and that ship is probably 3-4 seconds faster over the course of a medium turn kind of course. The Triakis is closer to what it should be in pulse, but still not there. So, I really don't care about time trial being equal, I'll just get records with all of the ships, but for single race, there should be a reason to choose all of the ships. I wrote a chart up of what I think would work and make the ships win the same amount of times with weapons on , but am not going to post it now because I have some other stuff to do.

So, in closing, balance the mulitplayer/arcade race, not the time trial. Make every ship a viable option, and have advantages. It's the pilots driving that will make the advantages work, or not work