Shrike is a tiny, but very well equipped fighter. It's design is generic though, and there are some questionable design choices regarding thrust settings and weapon power draw. Radar jammer and warhead hardpoints are great features that can't be found from many ships of this size.
The first impression was a suprise, as I expected great speed and maneuverability from such a small ship, and found out only averagely moving fighter. I highly recommend tweaking thrust settings for better performance.
Shield systems are very well designed, as it's very hard to get any good defensive capability to fit in such a small ship, and after some weapon tests it's fairly safe to assume that Shrike can survive most normal fighter confrontations.
Weapons are tuned to be as big as possible, resulting in high power draw and it takes skill to avoid power failure in tight spots. It feels like Shrike is designed for air superiority, but then, changing a pair of missiles to pre-installed warhead torpedoes would greatly increase capability of damaging bigger targets.
The original design came before the thrust update, and since then, I already have to lighten the armor and squeeze thruster blocks in every possible spot I can find, at this point it's a trade-off: I can only put more thrust on, if I remove shield blocks. The config unfortunately doesn't save with the blueprint when it's converted to a sment, so that has to be redone manually.
The Shrike best serves as a drone at this point of the game, especially since the fleet update, as realistically there will be very few occasions when its actual combat capabilities have to be utilised by a player. Let's face it, no one wants to fly a light fighter into a fleet battle if they can get their hands on anything bigger. Thus, the design was made that the power drain of the weapons is balanced around an AI's usage of thruster and weapon systems. (and the fact AI is unable to use a jammer) Also, for the same reason, warhead torpedoes are not included, as it would definitely take an actual pilot to unload those. And said pilot will probably want to fly a permacloaker corvette instead of a roleplay fighter. Still, thanks for the insight.