The following information on the Lightning gun is copy/pasted from a comment reply.....

Lightning gun damage is totally avoidable. It's range is 80m. Every other gun in the game has longer range than that. If you are being hit with LG, you could overdrive away out of danger. If you have the Blink gadget you could teleport out to safety. If you use Impunity you could be invulnerable for a few seconds while you escaped. If you had the Barrier gadget... or the GyroShield gadget....

My bet is you are trying to use the LG yourself, and that is forcing you into LG vs LG battles that you are often losing. However, a good pilot can out fly the enemy ship and avoid LG damage while giving plenty out. To do that you need to learn how to circle strafe.

Circle Stafing is where you hold a strafe key, and then turn your mouse to always keep your target in the centre of the screen. When you do that, you automatically fly a circle around your target. When you do this, the aim for the AI ships becomes worse. The skill to turn quickly and still have good aim is modeled in the enemy AI. Some are better at it than others.

So if you get in close, and circle strafe around a ship, he will have a seriously hard time hitting you.This is to mimic the same problem that real players have with their aim while rotating quickly.

Some real players are better at turning and aiming than others. The same is true for all the AI ships. You will find some that are so bad that they will never hit you while you are circle strafing, and others that are highly skilled, accurate and very quick to readjust their aim.

Utimately, while you are learning the game, you will always bump into some AI ship's that are simply more skilled than you, but they will never be smarter than you. You can always use tactics, gadgets, range or skill to beat them.

Tips for Collecting Loot

• Fly into the centre of the loot ball as it explodes. Hold your air-brakes key to stop. The loot will suck into you.
  
• Better yet: look for the bright yellow uranium loot ball first. Point at it. Keep pointing at it and thrust forward. You are guaranteed to collect it if you point at it constantly. Then brake and suck up all the other loot. (Uranium is the only one that isn't auto attracted to your ship.
  
• The most advanced and best technique is to fly through the uranium loot ball and keep going for about 5-10 metres. For a brief moment, all the other loot will have been sucked into a ball behind you. If you learn the timing, you can turn around and pick it all up in one go. This is the best technique simply because you are never stationary and so it's great during combat.
  
• Remember, if you are pointing at a loot ball constantly, you only need forward thrust to be almost guaranteed to fly through it. Your ship's thrust is easily strong enough to pull you straight towards whatever you are looking at.

Wish I had the time to write a wiki.