The reason for this is that the lasers use very little energy and allow the turrets to keep shooting pretty much continuously, the idea is that you do your fighting with the big guns, and the turrets prevent your target's shields from regenerating.
Re Cutlass: Every WC game introduced new ships. The Cutlass is basically a slightly upgraded Scimitar, not some kind of superfighter... if a fan game had introduced the Dragon we'd all have (and rightfully so) screamed munchkin. I think that the model is beautiful I will leave the Cutlass in as it adds all of 200kb to the download and, if we want to disable it, we can do so in about fifty seconds (less if we're good with grep). Right now we really should keep as many things as possible... I thought it was a beautiful ship and wanted to see it fly in its element, is all
I WILL remove the Delphinus though, that was just me playing around with Wings3D, and it has nothing to do with Wing Commander (it was supposed to be the space version of the skyship from Skies of Arcadia).
What I was thinking as a way to make everyone happy was to take the Cutlass model and "map" it to some fighter we have heard about in the novels, but we don't know what it looks like -- again, it's a beautiful ship and should fly. Would that be acceptable? ^_^ I thought i came up with a cute backstory for that ship design, but it doesn't matter to me, I just want to make sure that the MODEL is in because it's beautiful. There's plenty of ships we've seen mentioned in novels which we don't know what they look like, and since the Cutlass model has a WC1 look, it should fit right in with the pre-wc1 stories.