Hint: To get Earth Ubership, get 100 away team experience, ditch your flag, press F8 and type "getinthebooth" and warp to an uninhabited planet, and you get the ship. AND You own the planet.
Yeah, if you want to beat the red ball, you need to sacrifice shields for speed, or guns for speed, but the blue bomb-dropping balls just spam those uber-damaging things....one dropped about 10 in under 1 second.