I'm a diehard X-Wing jock. Unless I've got very specific mission objectives or roles that I know beforehand, I'll go with the X-Wing almost every time. Short of TIE Defenders, I know I can easily handle anything that's thrown against me when I'm in an X-Wing. It dogfights well, does semi-heavy assault pretty well, and has good offensive and defensive abilities.
If the mission is pure assault (No dogfighting at all), I'll grab a B-Wing if I can. It'll even do moderately well in a dogfight, but its turning rate and laser spread patterns are less than ideal for me.
For pure recon or simple dogfighting, an A-Wing is pretty nice, though it lacks the offensive punch of 4 lasers to really make me happy. When fighting TIEs in an X-Wing I can pretty well count on one shot per kill with the quad linked lasers, which lets me wipe out massive amounts of Imps in very short order. The A-Wing still allows this with only 2 lasers, but it gets a bit tougher because you just don't have the coverage that the X-Wing provides. For pure recon though, the A-Wing is impossible to beat (In the Rebel inventory). Pump the shields to 200%, load up some chaff and then divert all lasers to engine and keep shields at maintenance level. The countermeasures and shields should hold well enough against the occasional hit you may take weaving in and out of Imperial convoys at high speed.
If I want to totally cheese out and be practically invincible, I'll go with a TIE Defender. It's a fun ship, but I have a hard time flying it without feeling like I'm cheating somehow. It's just way too good. If there's a downside to it, I haven't found it yet.
Of course, with the warhead modeling in XWA you can make a good ship out of almost anything. With a well placed protorp you can wipe out entire flights of TIEs with a single shot (giving me a best kill time of roughly 6 seconds for 12 TIEs). Or you can use an enemy's own warheads against him. I went head to head against an X-Wing online not too long ago and he repeatedly tried to nail me with torpedos in a head on pass. I just pumped laser fire into him as he fired, and the torps blew up as they left his launch tubes and blew him apart immediately. Maybe it's a cheesy kill, but I don't want to get hit with his torps.
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For playing 'space tank' (And I mean this in a good way) or assaulting semi-cap ships or stations, the Falcon or Otana is hard to beat. Set the turret for autofire, padlock view to the target and then just use the stick and rudders to dance around the incoming fire while sending a constant stream into your much larger target. Can't beat that for pure destructive pleasure.
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[This message has been edited by Raptor (edited April 13, 2000).]