played it mostly on armorgames
I agree that the difference in difficulty between easy and normal is too great. It's almost impossible to lose on easy unless you're doing absolutley nothing. Normal is very challenging. A little too challenging, but I have beaten it, though not consistently.
Upgrading the main cannon pays good divedends. Swatting fighters out of the sky with one shot prevents them from causing any damage in the first place.
I do repair drones next, starting with maxing total number of drones.
I tend to shy away from using a lot of missile turrets. They're the most expensive turret, the missiles aren't very agile and they aren't "smart" enough to go after non-agile enemies.
I've been loading the entire front of the ship with flak cannons to clear mines and asteroids. Don't know if that's a good thing or not, I'm still experimenting with defensive loadouts.
Speaking of those, mines and asteroids cause a crap-load of damage, make them high-priority targets. Mines will chase fighters. I've had fighters that were close the ship slam a whole butt-load of mines into the ship, killing me.
Warning on reloading: If you die and restart, you restart with no fighters and no repair drones. The bays need time to produce them, so at the very beginning of the restart, you've got zero repairs going on.
I'm ambivalent about fighters. Sometimes they help, sometimes they don't. Remember that upgrading an existing bay from 1 fighter to 2 fighters costs 100 RU, building a brand new level 1 bay cost 150 RU.