Ships of the Empire

[UnLimiTeD]

Also true.
To feel save, give your Beam armed Fighters a backup sensor, it's ok if it has a range of 100k agaisnt 500 ton targets or bigger.
Once they've found the enemy, you don't need the long range.

So, in your case, use an R5 to R10, reduce the size by as much as possible, and get rid of the Electronic hardening, you might notice your fighters cost more than a low tech frigate.

[Brian Neumann]

If you are using 5.2 the new sensor rules make the smaller resolutions go farther than they used to go.  I would put a very small active sensor that is good for about double the range of the beam weapons you are mounting on your fighters.  This is so that even if they lose the long range scout fighter they are still combat capable.  I have vectored beam armed fighters in on several of my games using just passives from my main scout ship in the fleet.  When the fighters get in close they can activate their built in short range sensors and see their targets.  Without 1 active sensor detecting the target they can not fire at it.  

The resolution should be one that lets you see missiles at point blank range so you can use the fighters fire control to shoot at missiles if they are not shooting at anything else.

I would not bother with hardening the sensors at all on fighters, it is just to expensive, and you will have a lot of those short range sensors around to help you target your fire control.  As long as one of the fighters has their active sensors going, then all of them will be able to see what they need to shoot, even if it is different targets, just so long as they are grouped together.

Brian

[Andrew]

I have never had a ship hit with a a microwave beam so I consider Electronic hardening entirely useless. Total waste of space