I just finished a 1.6 DA game where the drengin created the most powerful medium hulled ships I'd seen thus far.

They were
attack 186 / 0 / 0
defense 3 /0 / 3
26 hit points

They had racial bonuses of ~80% weapons and ~60% defense, but that is already factored into the ship stats, right?

These ships were almost always used to guard planets.

I created a medium hulled ship
attack 226 / 0 / 0
defense 0 / 0 / 0
28 hit points

to counter them. Using the tie rule, I would expect both ships to blow each other up if they were singletons, but my ship to survive since it had more attack. I tried 3 or 4 times each week, for 3 weeks (reloading for the multiple attempts each week) to attack their singletons with my singletons, each time the enemy ship destroyed mine, and was left with ~8 hit points left.

What happened? Each of my ships was equipped with 7 doom rays. Neither side had a luck bonus.