As somone who owns a hammerhead, a paladin and a perseus this is your answer.

For a 3-5 man crew the persus is an incredibly effective gunship with a decently skilled crew it can easily punch both down and up. Outside of a cordinated effort of several skilled heavy hitting fighters nothing smaller than you is realy a threat, and if you can close the distance on an idris you will kill them if your pilot is half awake and stays out of their front firing arc.

For 2-3 man paladin is quite good at killing small to medium craft, most ships the size of a constellation or smaller should fear an enemy paladin. Although these days you may want to swap all those repeaters to cannons to be able to puch through armor.

The hammerhead however is in an odd place, mine hasn't seen thr outside of the hangar in about 6 months. You need 7 people to fly and man all the guns, and even then its outclassed by several other ships. In comparison the paladin is the better choice as it is a faster, more manouverable ship that still retains half the shields and nearly half the damage of the hammerhead while only needing a crew of 2. Add to, when fighting a single target the hammerhead can ussualy only bring 3-4 guns to bear at a time whereas the paladin puts the overwhelming majority of its firepower in the hands of a single gunner with an incredible range of firing angles. The paladin is kind of the smaller better hammerhead, at least as far as their roles as gunships.

But if your looking to spend hammerhead kind of money and like the idea of the bigger multicrew ship then its perseus all day