When I brought the Voltaire head to head against the Viscount, one thing I noticed was its shields tend to go down a lot more quickly, despite an almost equal number of deflectors. That's because the front of the Voltaire gives it a horribly inefficient deflector coverage. That, and the Viscount's sweeping mega beams are very good at finding all the gaps in its shielding. And once the front beamers are gone, the Voltaire is practically defanged. The Forsch guns don't help either, although I used an older version of the Voltaire which admittedly don't have a pair of its own.
And the narrow pieces at the back of the engines are meant to be some sort of vectored thrust array, not exhaust.
I did consider adding exhaust at some point though, using aegis-shielded narrow pieces to achieve a nice glowy effect. It would have been interesting to see their impact on aft protection!
That said, the Spectre is still more of a hit-and-run combatant than a head-on slugger, equipped with a special extended-range Dieterling Device with twice the range and the energy capacity of the original than allows the ship to perform two consecutive long jumps. Its pod launchers can fill the vacuum with 48 Demeter drones in seconds and the impeder platforms are great for annoying the opponent.
