Citadel Space

And all of the above shows why we should never fly alone

Actually the ret is way less of sitting duck. It shouldn't have any blind spots with the amount of turrets it has. But agreed it will being over agile. Good pilots will be the ones who are patient. Avoiding as much dam as possible and keeping weapons off cooldown until the enemy pilot makes a mistake and they eat some full salvos.

Plus their missiles and torpedos are fire and forget. Get a lock and launch. Then they have to deal with a large swarm of death dealing explosive sticks of love coming at them.
Also the ret could be the glass cannon. Not something you take out solo but you need a couple other ships to tank or harass. Uee lore says they send out huge squadrons of rets at once.

Well see. In hangar module we can mess with upgrades. I imagine more raw data will be available which is what I live for.

Sorry folks, went AWOL over the weekend with wedding planning.

Let's theorycraft a couple scenarios.
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If for some reason someone decided to fly their Constellation out alone and encountered a Retaliator which is also alone... it would come down to the first few moments of combat. If the Connie has both top and bottom turret in the front manned it could immediately lower its profile by facing head on and begin peppering the Tally with turret fire while the missile bays open and lock on.
If the Tally is ready to engage it would need to close the distance between the two as quickly as it can and orient itself so that all turrets available can fire. This would mean a bigger target for the Connie. So at this point it would depend on the loadout. I fully expect the Tally to have higher hull density and resilience but the Connie could very well avoid more shots fired than the Tally could. I would bet money on the Tally, still, if only for the higher weapons capacity versus the Connie's potentially weaker hull.

Now, if they were part of a wing, the Tally would engage the fighters with the turrets and attempt evasive patterns for any larger blasts/torpedoes. The Connie, if pitted against a larger group would need to rely on fighter support heavily as it's easy to outnumber the turrets and targeting a group of fighters with missiles is a challenging task as far as target priority is concerned. I would still place my bet on the Tally for its combat effectiveness.

And neither of these scenarios go into the possible upgrades either could have.

I'm actually please at the Cutlass specs. Very maneuverable. To bad all lore depictions pit as the Ford Pinto of Ships.