Hit chance needs to be entirely based on the profile of the ship from the angle it's being shot at - not the core size.
Vector differences must play a much larger role.
L weapons should have tracking that is pitiful. An L missile should simply be unable to effectively hit a small ship that is changing it's vector.
HP of voxels need to be rebalanced from the ground up and not just be weight based. More complicated to make voxels should have benefits over simple to make voxels.
A power system needs to be added to further cripple xs ships mounting L weapons - it should be viable to mount upsized guns, but it should come with some serious downsides - IE having to have a ton of capacitors that get drained fully just from a single shot and need time to recharge etc.
I disagree that building good looking ships for pvp is pointless. It doesn't matter if your cube is shot up or your pretty pirate ship. You're likley going to be scrapping them both and redeploying from BP anyway because fixing voxels currently is too much of a hassle. Easier to scrap and redeploy.
The only reason people are doing cubes currently is that there is an advantage for filling the build grid but no penalties.
Ultimately a pvp ship that doesn't get hit due to a small profile is better than one that gets hit a bunch but lives - you don't have to fix the ship that never got hit.
After you finish it - you can just drag a voxel cube around it, just make it centered. 99% you won't feel any difference, but will be flying in borg ship instead. So what really matters is elements relative placing, you can then do whatever you want around them with voxels.
I have just realized that there is no such a thing like voxel obstruction in the game - elements are obstructed only by other elements. So I can effectively just put everything I need for a ship into one big monolithic voxel cube and fly like a damn borg ship with same efficiency as players placed their stuff in adequate way... Will this stay like this?
Below is a completely functional ship from DU perspective and it flies perfectly fine... while being just a bunch of piloting elements bulged into one solid voxel cube