Fighter Speed vs BFC Tracking Speed

[liveware (OP)]

Is there any reason to optimize for fighter craft which possess speed in excess of whatever your current research permits in terms of best BFC tracking speed? To me it seem optimal to design fighters with speed slightly higher than max attainable BFC tracking speed.

[Iceranger]

Faster fighters move through enemy range faster, and are less likely to be hit.

[Jorgen_CAB]

I probably would need to know the purpose if said fighter first. What are its design parameters, main and secondary job, range and endurance needs etc..

Whatever you try to make most efficient will come at the price of something else being compromised.

[Ulzgoroth]

Being faster is always good. Even if it doesn't improve your offensive tracking, it still makes you a harder target and lets you cover space faster.

Also, for missile fighters your beam tracking speed is irrelevant...and once your missile fighters are faster the beam fighters might want to be faster to be able to keep up.

(Of course being faster is also always expensive in tonnage, so as always that's something to balance out.)

[xenoscepter]

Designing a fighter with higher speed than max B-FCS tracking speed will result in that excess speed being "wasted" for the purposes of target tracking, yes.

It is not optimal to design to B-FCS tracking speed, in fact the opposite is true, it is optimal to design for racial tracking speed. B-FCS max tracking is 4x the Racial Tracking Tech, however when your ship goes slower than your Racial Tracking and your B-FCS is at least equal to that tracking tech, your weapons will track at the Racial Tracking tech rather than your ship's actual speed. So you can save weight in Engines and Fire Control by forgoing speed... at least for your Beam Fighters.

These will make poor offensive machines, mind you... and designing ships the way you have been would be considered efficient, as it makes the most out of the speed that you have already paid for in engines and fuel. It is still, however, still very useful to build more speed into your designs than you need for a few reasons:

 - Future proofing, in C# you can now refit fighters, so swapping out an FCS is trivial.

 - Range, with more speed you can dictate the terms of engagement, effectively choosing not only when and where, but also if you want to engage the enemy.

 - Evasion, "In combat speed is life, ya go slow... ya die." Especially true for fighters which can't effectively mount heavy defenses.

 - Exposure, the less time you spend in range of their guns, the less damage you take. Paired with the improved evasion conferred by it and speed can prove to be vital asset to any fighter craft.

[Ulzgoroth]

If your fighters are slower than your racial tracking tech, I don't think I'd call them fighters. More like gunboats.

(Okay I have some missile boats that I branded as strike fighters. But to be fair when I built them they were much faster than anything else...I just didn't have any engine boost tech yet. Successor models have gotten more fighter-like.)

[liveware (OP)]

So it seems the consensus is that speed is an advantage, even in excess of BFC or RT speed, as it reduces the amount of time a particular ship will spend within firing range of a potential hostile ship. That seems reasonable to me.

Mr. xenoscepters arguments concerning BFC vs RT speed are concepts that I must test more for myself to be sure of my own understanding. However for the time being, I will continue to design ships with overall speed very close to my best BFC tracking speed, as this has proven to me to provide useful ships with reasonable survivability and damage statistics.