Assuming you mean the -G16D, those are actually RAC/2s, not 5s.
Interesting bird, I'd never looked closely at it before. With your guns only reaching out to medium range at best, this is pretty clearly meant to be a ground attack bird. You can fight other aircraft, though unless you have a buddy to provide covering fire or to look scary and draw fire away, you'll have issues against anything that outrange you. Oddly enough, your heat sinks are those of a dogfighter, with your nose and one wing only putting you at 2 heat. You'll have to be careful during ground strikes. The temptation may be to spike your heat and then spend a turn to circle around and cool down, but don't forget that the really nasty part of the aero heat scale starts at 5, and given the era this bird came out, ground-to-air plasma fire is a thing.
That being said, this can still put a healthy amount of hurt into a ground target. You'll want to go for the backs of any heavily armored mechs, as you're not going to punch through any solid plating, but you can backstab just fine, and same goes for crit-seeking damaged mechs, acting as a vulture to finish things off while your mechs find new targets. As with anything with one or more cluster weapons, sides of tanks are going to be fun to hit. Using your lasers to start things off and then finishing with the RAC should actually make this aircraft fairly nasty against battle armor as well. It'd be a lasers-only attack, but if you can find a clump of BA with no larger units around, it would be one of the only times when strafing would be a non-suicidal idea.
Fuel is respectable and pretty standard, and 135 rounds for two RACs is more than enough, especially given how loud and short most fighter lifespans often are. If you can actually burn through all that ammo in a single sortie, it means you're flying a perfect game, and nobody's gotten a single shot off at you in return. Speaking of which, don't try to brave heavy return fire. Your armor can't really take it. Your nose is just fine for a fighter this size, but your wings and tail are scary thin. Unless your opponent is trying to plink you to death, any hits there are extremely likely to generate threshold crits. Get in, do a small handful of passes, then go home before your wings fall off. It's a shame, really. If the wings were tougher, it'd be viable to land this thing and use it as a powerful(if slow) medium tank. You think hiding a tank in a parking garage is funny, try doing it with a starfighter. Bring a camera, because when you fire from ambush, back out into the street behind you, and then fly away, the look on your opponent's face is one you'll want to remember for a long time. :)
