- Well, Eningeering Fighter is a lot of MSP for 5 tons. More than equal Maint Storage IIRC, but the rub is that you need a crew for it so depending on the design it might not be advantageous.

This is no longer true - I think it was once the case under some conditions but that got changed. MSP bays always give more MSP per ton than engineering spaces now.

Somewhere there is a post about the mechanics but I can't remember where offhand...

- It's a lot of MSP for 5 tons. And it basically makes maintenance failures all but impossible, and routine stuff like FCS / Sensors fixable. A good deal if you can spare the 5 tons.

See, that's my thing: I can spare 2.5 tons, so I use fighter-size MSP instead. Also to me, the most important repair is the engine, otherwise if that breaks the fighter is stranded and helpless, so I'd rather have enough MSP for the worst case than play probabilities with the engineering space.

Yeah, I wouldn't remove engineering from a beam fighter for that exact reason. A missile fighter, OTOH, it's an acceptable risk since you're only going to shoot once. Odds of the launcher malfunctioning are minimal.

Do people put engineering spaces on fighters? I usually just put enough MSP bays to repair a breakdown and call it good, unless it's a deep space recon fighter with a longer deployment time.

Arc Wolf, for some reason I've always assumed the deployment field only accepted integers! Your comment is now saving me 10 to 15 tons on a 500 ton fighter, thank you!

You can also leave the engineering spaces off entirely. Even if it says a maintenance period of a day or whatever, with the way maintenance works it's practically impossible for a maintenance failure to happen within the first 5 days.

Though I suppose having the supplies will help if the gun breaks when firing.

F47 class Fighter (P)      500 tons       15 Crew       98.7 BP       TCS 10    TH 100    EM 0
10009 km/s      Armour 1-5       Shields 0-0       HTK 3      Sensors 0/0/0/0      DCR 0      PPV 3
Maint Life 5.32 Years     MSP 52    AFR 20%    IFR 0.3%    1YR 3    5YR 46    Max Repair 50 MSP
Lieutenant Commander    Control Rating 1   
Intended Deployment Time: 1 months    Morale Check Required   

Ion Drive  EP100.00 (1)    Power 100    Fuel Use 626.10%    Signature 100    Explosion 20%
Fuel Capacity 15,000 Litres    Range 0.86 billion km (23 hours at full power)

10cm Railgun V20/C3 (1x4)    Range 20,000km     TS: 10,009 km/s     Power 3-3     RM 20,000 km    ROF 5       
Beam Fire Control R48-TS12000 (SW) (1)     Max Range: 48,000 km   TS: 12,000 km/s     79 58 38 17 0 0 0 0 0 0
Magnetic Mirror Fusion Reactor R3-PB30 (1)     Total Power Output 3    Exp 15%

RTX Mk 1 AESA (1)     GPS 2     Range 2m km    MCR 181.7k km    Resolution 1

This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and planetary interaction
This design is classed as a Fighter for auto-assignment purposes

Is there a strategic reason for the 1 month deployment on your fighters? If not, consider reducing the deployment to 3ish days, this will cut down on crew needed (down to 3-5) as well as freeing up more tonnage which you can then use to increase your engine size & speed.

@Garfunkel, well noted on this being a Soviet-style design choice... When searching for a name I considered the "Kiev" class but felt that was too on-the-nose.

The problem I was trying to solve was that unless you have enough fighters to perform highly effective PD, they can be shredded by ships with AMMs and a few spare MFC (only 5 to 10 tons each, why not add 10 or 20 to a large ship as cheap anti-fighter or FAC insurance). Or they can be shredded by ships with beam PD plus extra BFC (not as effective since BFC are much larger to get tracking speed, but still achievable); e.g. enemy fighters or STO weapons. This is not a theoretical problem; it happens regularly when you try to clear out a fleet turtling at a home planet or spoiler defended moon/planet with significant STO units supporting, and in player vs player campaigns would be easy to use as a counter to a fighter-heavy enemy. Hence I wanted some larger ship which could tank the AMM spam (with PD help from the fighters) until the enemy runs out of AMMs and be able to preferentially take out the beam PD ships at range while the fighters are still holding back. I suppose the enemy could then try to close with you, and since the carrier cruisers are so slow they wouldn't be able to hold the range open very long, so at a minimum I'd need to make them faster.

I guess an alternative to this would be to make the fighters longer ranged, i.e. give them reduced shot larger bore railguns, or 10cm lasers, but then they'd be much, much less able to defend themselves from missiles. Or I could split the carrier and cruiser functions apart as suggested, and keep the carriers away from the fight. However, I would almost certainly not be able to build them at the same shipyard, which was one benefit of the carrier cruiser concept, and would need a 2nd large shipyard or to retool in between, which is expensive for large shipyards in both time and resources.

Putting commercial engines on means needing to build even bigger naval shipyards to keep a reasonable speed (although the fuel savings is non-trivial). I already build tugs and cargo/colonist/fuel/harvester/troop pods to be towed, which makes my transport fleet much more flexible... Why not take the idea to the extreme and build hanger-pods that are towed to battle by those tugs? That separates the engines (which you'd like to upgrade every so often) from the hanger moduels, which are expensive and never need to be updated. It also separates the military-only parts (hanger decks, sensors if desired, armor if desired but now likely not needed) from the commercial parts (engines, fuel, MSP, engineering bays, etc), which keeps your naval shipyard size lower and the ships and pods RCS lower.

The problem with any approach where the carriers are lightly defended at any point (transit to battle or once the fighters are deployed to the target) is they are very, very vulnerable to SHTF when your enemy surprises you. You could leave some fighters back to defend, or one or more military ships, I suppose. You should also need to put more fuel on your fighters, to give them enough range to leave the carrier-pods somewhere further back of the fight.

Echoing the others advice. However I do want to say that this is probably gonna be just fine against NPR's of around your tech level and while it is heavy metal for the task, it's a great supply convoy escort.

If you were designing it for use against players though, a redesign is probably a good idea.

Traditional wisdom is that, especially at early tech levels, specialization is the best path forward. That means that Soviet Navy style hybrids are inherently less effective than their American Navy counterparts. So instead of combining a guided missile cruiser and a carrier into a single ship such as Heavy Aircraft Cruiser Admiral Kuznetsov , you should build two separate ships, such as the Guided Missile Cruiser USN Ticonderoga and Nuclear Aircraft Carrier USN Enterprise.

In other words, your carrier should just be engines, hangars, fuel tanks, magazines for missiles if your fighters use them, and engineering. Even sensors can be, aside from emergency stuff, put into dedicated sensor fighters instead. Some players take this principle to maximum by putting large commercial engines on their carriers, which makes them slow but saves a lot on fuel since tactically it hardly matters as your fighters will be zapping around faster than anything your enemies can throw at you. And you can just keep upgrading the fighters as tech progresses, maybe replace the engines once you hit the next level. Cheaper and faster to build than any sort of hybrid, so you can have more of them as well.

And then your cruiser should be bristling with weaponry and have enough engines to be able keep up with enemies since it'll be beam-armed. But with beam armed fighters, you don't have much need for beam armed cruisers, except for the two slugfests that are like to happen - JP assaults and clearing out STO units from planets. Though even in those cases, the fighters might be able to do the job equally well.

Naturally, your RP might require your nation/faction/power to design ships very differently and that's just fine too.