This strategy never fails. Really. It is so much like cheating that it has made the game boring.
Attack a ship with warship AI that is slower than you. It will chase you and try to attack you. Run away from it, so that it is chasing you and you are JUST outside their range of turret/gun fire, and you are moving at the their speed. Fire your guns (turrets have shorter range, and thus don't work as well, try to get the longest range gun weapons you can). Your shots will hit their ship but theirs will not hit yours. Actually, if you do it right the enemy ship won't even fire its weapons. Why? Most primary weapons move at a certain speed, RELATIVE TO STATIONARY, NOT YOUR SHIP SPEED! Therefore, if you are in a ship moving at a speed of 300, and you fire a weapon with a speed of 700 in the opposite direction you are moving, the projectile moves away from you at a speed of 1000. The relative speed increases, but length of time the projectile exists before disappearing remains the same, therefore the total distance between your ship and the projectile when it expires is greater than if you are not moving at all. Anotherwords, the range of your ship's weapons are greater than the range of the enemy ship's weapons, allowing to blast them to pieces at a safe distance.
Imagine being in space traveling at 10 meters/second and throwing a rock at 10 meters/second in the opposite direction of your motion. Neglecting Newton's third law (that throwing the rock would increase your speed), the rock should be stationary after you throw it and the difference between the rock's speed and your speed would be 10 meters/second. In the Escape Velocity universe, if you threw that rock at 10 meters/second in the direction opposite your motion, the rock would travel 10 meters/second in the direction you threw it, which would mean a difference of 20 meters/second.
The net result is that a smaller, faster ship (a krait for example) can take out a much larger ship while taking zero damage. In the original EV I destroyed a number of confederate cruisers with a shuttlecraft using this method, and I am surprised that no one seems to have discovered it yet. The bug would be very easy to fix, just add the ship's velocity (taking direction into account) at the time the weapon is fired to the weapon's velocity (also taking direction into account) and the weapon would move relative to the ship, as it should.
One final note: although the ships usually will not fire secondary weapons if you do it right, and even if they do you could probably dodge them, secondary weapons like rockets or missiles can hit your ship due to their range. If you are fighting a ship with lots of secondary weapons, try flying around them and letting them waste their ammo before using this strategy, that way they will only have primary weapons (which can't hit you). In the original EV, I'd let corvettes fire off all their rockets before I started shooting in my Lightning, equipped with only 5 laser cannons and no secondary weapons.
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A dozen, a gross, and a score,
Plus three times the square root of four,
Divided by seven,
Plus five times eleven,
Equals nine squared plus zero, no more.
