In war, the opposing sides usually do everything they can to defeat the other, unless it is Mutually Assured Destruction (and even that might change soon, who knows). If a Lib an American bomber squadron meets a handful of ISIS operatives on the ground armed with spears and stones, they will drop their full ordinance on them and call for missile support from the capital fleet at sea. Someone else would probably just attack them on land with an outnumbering army because they can't afford wasting missiles on every beetle they see.
Unless you are in Liberty or called Wesker, this is unusual and highly frowned upon in Discovery. And that is good, because Disco is not real war, it is a game, thus its purpose is fun, and fair fights are better fun. But Disco is also run on an RP server.
So, how to make fair fights, duels and the like, blend into the role-play environment?
Honor, codizes, reputation for snubs, target clearance for capitals.
When Morosz is on the field for example, he lets his inferiors duel the enemy as one guy should be able to take out another guy. Throwing bigger ships at snubs is always bad inRP, because other than technically ingame, the shots of capital ships are bigger than snub fire. In Freelancer, the hitbox of particles is always similar, tho.
In capital fights, ECM and ECCM?
To be honest, I wouldn't even try to explain inRP why ships stand out of the fight. It's highly contradicting what would make sense, but this is a game, even when it is a roleplay server. Throw in engagement lines, have a well-balanced pew, when the fight is done, return to roleplay-behavior. I mean, nothing is more annoying than people RPing during a fight.
I honestly don'y give a damn about me getting ganked. I'm always happy to give people blues. Unless they CD spam me, making me unable to defend myself.
Ganking is not cool and i always try to stay out of those. Yes, there was a time when I ganked to destroy all enemies, but now I always try to not gank.
For the rp solution: *name*: It seems that they have the situation covered, returning to *Name of a base*.