Spotlight: Dart class

When it comes to fighter craft, there are three schools of thought. One way to go about the business of designing fighter craft is to have them as heavily shielded and armoured as possible, adding as many guns as you can and sacrificing speed and maneuverability. The second way is to sacrifice shields and armour, entirely in some cases, and having only lower powered weapons but gaining the advantage in acceleration, maneuverability and speed. The third idea is to balance the two.

Spur dart in standard flight orientation.

The dart class is the epitome of the second school of thought. It is fast, maneuverable and lacks nearly all shielding with next to no armour and little more than hand held rifles strapped to the sides. The dart class was first envisioned by Alliance Armoury with their proton fighters, however the proton had a few major flaws that prevented it from ever leaving the testing phase. Alliance Armoury released the plans for the proton fighter in the hopes that another company would pick up the idea and create a market for dart class.
Much to Alliance Armoury's dismay the dart class was far more successful than they ever imagined. Inter-Orbital Inc. picked up the idea but started from scratch on their own design. They released the Spur dart later that year in TPY 2367.

Spur Dart. Notice the engines
and weapons have gimbled.

The Spur dart quickly found its place on the battlefield and was adopted by many governments across the Federation as their dart class fighter. Her tiny spaceframe and four separately rotating engines allowed skilled pilots to pull off very complex maneuvers such as disabling flight assist and rotating a full 360 degrees, firing on and destroying a pursuer before re enabling flight assist and continuing in her initial direction. 
The Spur was armed with 6 small gimbaled hard points allowing pilots to swap out the standard issue laser weapons for plasma launchers or projectile weaponry, however needing to store ammunition added to the craft's weight so most pilots stuck with lasers. The spur also packed a pair of "boost" engines that could be activated in short bursts to give the ship an acceleration that would put many missiles to shame, she used these to easily get out of range of her enemies to come around for a more favorable attack vector. 

Spur Dart from the front.

The spur class's immense advantage on the battlefield allowed a squadron to quickly clear any enemy fleet fleet of light fighters although she was vulnerable to capitol ship's AA weaponry. This advantage kept the Spur class in service for far longer than most ships, she was refitted with new technology as it became available but the overall design barely changed over the years.
The dart class was one of the most vulnerable ships on the battlefield, leading to the nickname "flying coffin" however no fleet could do without them and ace dart pilots were widely respected.