But Harrier is a terrible fighter plane and was mainly used due to its VTOL capability, that allowed "mini-carriers" to ferry them to combat zones. The plane lacks an integral gun and thus the need to carry a gun-pod like the Equalizer. So it kinda proves the point Scandinavian was making.
The space weaponry is so, so, so much larger in Aurora when compared to air-to-air or air-to-ground weaponry in current use, that the swappable pod concept for fighters in space combat really doesn't fly. I'll use the Equalizer as an example: it weights 122 kgs and a Harrier weighs 6,340 kg. That's less than 2%.
Even the smallest lasers (10cm Focal Size) are 150 tons. With Reduced-size you can bring it down to 100 tons but then you have to accept quadrupled recharge times. That's still 20% of your 500 ton fighter, or even a higher percentage if you're making a faster interceptor-type fighter. To me, swapping something that is twenty percent of the mass of a fighter does not sound doable. Even the B-52, that could carry 31 tons of bombs, couldn't just swap those bombs with some other weapon, because it was purpose-built to carry bombs in its cavernous bomb bays and nothing else.
So replacing weapon pods for ground support sounds reasonable and that's already in. Swapping space combat weapons like pods does not sound reasonable, as long as we're using current sizes (and if lasers or box launchers can suddenly be miniaturized even further, it has serious ramifications to ship-to-ship combat too).