But you have 7 ships on one side and 6 on the other. Scale that up to 32 a side and you get serious imbalances.

Plus, remember that you aren't gonna be with a load of AI who follow you and listen to your orders.  A guy in a Defender will get plenty of one-on-one fights, which he'll win easily.

As Bandu said, the best way is to have it focus in a single mission. For example, there was on old Tie Fighter mission about protecting Tie Defender prototypes. Something like that could be done.

Still, remember that every new ship makes the mod take longer to come out.

The avenger is about equal to the A-Wing in ability, so it could be included. Still - currently the reb ships have shields and the imp ones dont, so putting in the Avenger spoils that difference.

How about a TIE X1 instead? In the death star mission.

I'm personally more concerned about accuracy than anything else. With a game like this, it isn't priority number one, but it should still be in the top five. History has shown that war typically balances itself out for the most part. One faction will create an effective weapon or craft, the opposing faction will attempt to counteract it with their own weapon or craft and so on. There's a lot more variables than that, but it's the very basic gist of it. Now granted, history has also shown that it's rarely a perfect balance, but it's more than suitable enough for a video game. Especially with a man made fantasy like Star Wars for a media like video games.

I've always understood that technical accuracy has to be sacrificed to some degree or another in the name of great gameplay (excluding simulators). The problem is, LucasArts has always crossed the line with past Star Wars games and sometimes made incredibly stupid sacrifices (Battlefront 1 & 2 for couple examples). Back when I was apart of this mod, one of the main goals was to create the most realistic and technically accurate Star Wars games to date while still including fantastic gameplay. From the looks of things, it looks like some of the priorities have shifted, lol. I hope not. Some of the technical info I've been seeing on quite a few threads have been off by quite a bit.