i actually think the best way to prolong dogfights is to cripple guided weapons. make locks take longer, reduce missile maneuverability, reduce missile count, disallow or limit the availability support ships, etc. secondly, for primary weapons, cripple the accuracy of weapons at the top end of the dps scale, for example using $fof: or reducing weapon velocity. third thing you want to do is make ships faster and more nimble. if you want to take things a bit further you can do all kinds of cool things with armor and subsystems. for example give the ships hull a really resilient armor type, and use standard armor on subsystems, and lots of extra subsystems. this will reward accurate shooting, and require the shooter to take calculating shots against subsystems, instead of just shooting the hull. as the subsystems get shot off, they will take some percentage of the hull with em. to prevent crippling shots, like against engines or weapons, harden those subsystems.
make weapons damage so ridiculously complex that players have a hard time figuring out which weapons give an advantage and which ones are total crap for a particular situation. **** with their heads, make the standard issue weapon really effective in certain situations, where the advanced weapons have trouble. lots of damage types, lots of armor types, sweet spots and penalties. if you 20 of a fighter that a particular weapon is good at taking out, then throw in an ace that has armor that is really effective against that weapon.
not sure what you can do with ai these days though, might be possible to give them survival instincts up the wazoo. so il leave that one open. i usually tend to prefer to make ships easier to kill so that the player has to have good situational awareness to survive. you can kill that ship in front of you, but what about the one to port and the two behind you?
