BTW fist, my remark about the Nova class ship was not towrds you or the mod. it was to the designers of the show. I guess you all know nothing about Aerodynamics. I spent 11 years in the Marines and the F-18 had a very simular issue with its stabs. they added a small stab on the F-18 in front of the rear stabs to keep the from doing what I pointed out.
Speaking as someone who is studying to go into aeronautical engineering, you have to be very silly to think that Earth's skies and the void of space act the same way.
Ships are not subject to the same G forces or have to worry about lift and drag. That's of course besides the point that this is soft sci-fi, where real constraints are not seriously considered for the most part.
The fact is, this mod uses the Sins Engine.
Okay, and? Just because it uses the same engine does not mean that the game has to play the exact same way.
Fact two, it uses the same AI. The AI will use the same charateristics as the orginal games does.
Of course the AI is unchanged. However, does that mean that the game must play the same, that the ships have to be the same way? The answer to this is no. In order for the AI to function correctly, it only needs the following: proper siege frigate, proper colony frigate, proper scout, capital ship with colonizing ability (note: does not need COLONY RoleType). A nice bonus would be to give it ships for every statcounttype (ex. LRF, light frigs, etc), and in the case of frigates, you can give these any sort of RoleType (ex. a ship with a carrier statcounttype can have a RoleType of a light frigate and the AI will treat it as such).
With those aside, you can in fact make the game play entirely differently, as you can manipulate abilities to entirely change how things play, you can throw out Sins' rock-paper-scissors format, you can throw out shield mitigation/armor/shielding, you can change up a factions' research to make them act like an entirely different faction, and so on. I fear you simply have little experience with total conversion mods and as such think they have to borrow many elements from the base game, rather than the bare minimums, which is what ST: SoA2 has done. In fact, I suggest taking a look at Sins of a Galactic Empire and Sins of the Prophets, and compare those two to the base game or even each other. Both of those play differently than base Sins primarily due to how their ships are. Why can't this mod be the same in that regard?