Would you or someone else please write down what a likely fighter combat scenario would look like?
In my campaign, there is a bit of a conflict between the explorer corps and the rest of the navy of the numbering formula for "Xth battle of Y system".
The explorers consider any encounter where the active sensors of an enemy are detected to be a battle. Other branches only count 'battles' as events where fire was exchanged, so unarmed ships getting blown up don't count.
So, since I consider the scouting battle to be rather important, and a lot of fun, I will go into some detail about it.
Some 10-15 billion km and several jumps from Earth, one of my scout fighters detects enemy presence in a system. This happens in several ways:
They check major bodies in a system, and discover a listening post with its 5 or 10 thermal, and possibly the scouts actives detect ground troops.
Or they happen upon an enemy fleet. Depending on whether it is a long endurance pinnace, or a fast fleet scout, the scout might detect the actives in time to run away. They are most vulnerable if they were detected on thermal sensors, but that generally only happens if the enemy does not have long ranged anti-ship sensors that give away their presence.
Subsequent probes, including with long endurance sensor missiles, localize what bodies the enemy is focused around, and might get information about enemy AMM armament, or possibly beams that kill the probe missiles.
A picket is always left at the jump point to the enemy system. If the scouts did their job, they don't reveal where they came in. But if the NPR starts exploring they will have some forces that are harder to account for. On the one hand, you can defeat them without them having an easy retreat or reload of missiles, but on the other, you won't know where exactly to find them. So you will want a scout that can shadow the enemy outside the range that it can be detected. Of course, a player could have relatively stealthy ships waiting in their wake to kill a shadow that blunders into them, but the AI is not that sophisticated. But they might do something like that accidentally.
If you are on offense vs an enemy that is clearly tied to a particular body, you can lead off with sensor missiles, or preposition scouts for when your main fleet enters their detection range. For the most part, I prefer that my carriers never enter their system at all. But when the jump point is pretty far out, part of the job of the scouts is to bring the enemy out to about a billion km from the jump point, where they won't be able to detect the fighters and FACs, and also where they won't be able to withdraw.
Depending on how worried I am about enemy missiles, and relative speeds, I can either have my combined railgun, sensor fighters, and missile FAC proceed inward in a bloc, or just with the railgun fighters, sensor fighters, and a sacrificial bait FAC to draw enemy missile fire. My missile FACs tend to be significantly slower than my railgun fighters. Again, this is a tactic that works very well vs the AI, not so much vs players. And bleeding out enemy missiles is pretty tedious.
A lot depends on whether I have enough railgun fighters to be able to defeat AMM spam. If you know the exact range of the enemy missiles, you can jink in and out of enemy range, and they just blow up when they run out of fuel. That is a bit of an exploit. My missiles fighters tend to have a wide variety of missiles, as I try to use old, obsolete missiles as effectively as I can. Where possible, I engage with short range missiles that deliver the largest warheads that can be accurately delivered against the known target's speed.
Enemy AMMs are the bane of fighters. However, the enemy will usually fire 1-3 AMMs at each of your missiles, even if you are firing ridiculously cheap decoys that have no warhead. So an option is to bleed the enemy of AMMs by firing hundreds of .05 BP cost decoy missiles at them.
Again, this is also a bit of an exploit.
Now, some of these tactics you can do with full sized ships as well. However, it is a lot easier to figure out the enemy's range vs smallcraft, and a lot easier for them to dodge out of missile range when their missile detection range is a significant percentage of the enemy AMM range.