It isn't perfect, but spawning pirate drones in to a survival world can give you a base-line input.

-Load up a survival world (I like Empty World set to survival without cargo-ships, random encounters, drones, or progression),
-Access the admin tools with alt-f10 and enable creative tools, untargetable, and use all terminals,
-Spawn in an AI-ship(drone) to fight (like in creative), if it doesn't already come loaded with parts/ammo/fuel use the shift-f10 menu to load it with what it needs, then transfer it to SPRT,
-Fly 3km, spawn in your own ship, load it with what it needs,
-Fly your ship toward the AI ship, it should spot you and start doing its thing at around 2.5km once the AI cycles,
-Fight
-Repeat a few (or several) times to ensure an accurate average of fight-data is obtained.

The view is sadly pretty bad, but it provides quite a good protection. This vessel is expected to stand against smaller guns in which case this setting could save the camera for a while.

Good call with the cargo protection. Sadly I lack means to test those builds properly in realistic conditions, so I miss these important things quite often.

I had never thought of putting a conveyor tube in front of a camera as armor, I will need to test to see how well that works.

The cargo for that rocket launcher could probably use either heavy armor or a gyro in front of it. If something takes the rocket-cargo out then the gyros mounted to its sides tend to bounce around the inside of the ship when it moves and cause a lot of damage.