M ships only using turrets during boarding

[Salidorian]

So I recently got into boarding and noticed that my cobras and dragons are only using turrets to attack surface targets which are too weak to actually kill the surface elements. I have a few asps that added to my boarding fleet and they seem to be firing their main guns just not my bigger ships. How do I get my bigger ships to fire on surface elements to actually kill surface targets?

Should I just use smaller ships with no turrets to attack surface stuff?
Fill the sky’s with cobras so that they can do it?(or any gunboat)
Dragons seem to be useless in boarding unless it’s the player ship

This leads to bigger questions like what about stations? Will main guns not fire on station surface targets? If I have to use 1000 small fighters because my bigger ships won’t actually fire on station surface targets then that seems… counter intuitive

Is there a guide to the full behavior as to what fires on what and when? I cannot afford to build hundreds of fighters/corvvetts/frigates for testing in my game yet

Thank you for your assistance in advance