I am sorry to have to agree with you, Jorgen_CAB. Fighters, as of now, are too vulnerable to be more than a defensive, or at best, a secondary offensive weapon. I had a battle where both I and my enemy exhausted our missile supplies, in this situation the fighters came in handy to mop up. Fighters are very good against enemies that cannot defend themselves anymore
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But to deploy just one squadron of beam fighters you'll need some very expensive paraphernalia, like carriers or PDCs, and when in battle you will have to babysit them all the time. All in all it means that they get a fairly low priority in my mobilization plans. I'd rather build a series of tender-served FACs because they deliver a harder punch and have a lot more survivability for the same amount of babysitting.
Not that I mind babysitting, I don't mind microing, actually I like it, my main argument is that fighters are not economically efficient. In my "serious" campaigns I have prohibited any use of SM except for correcting obvious blunders or bugs, so economy is an important factor for me. That I build carriers and fighters at all is mainly for role playing purposes - I like the idea of carriers.
Also, I like the idea of ground-based fighters. My populations want security, and why not build some cheapo PDC hangar installations and let the fighters do the riot control? As the OP mentions, fighters are a great way to organize a lot of officers, a place where you can keep all the talented lieutenants that you don't have an immediate use for, but that you also don't want to see retired in the next purge.
A system of ground-based air training PDC's could then later function as the reserve pool for an offensive carrier task force, providing the economy and the prevailing military doctrine should allow such a thing.
Last I tried out this idea of ground-based fighter training facilities, it failed somewhat, because in Aurora you could not at that time (a year ago RL) repair fighters in a PDC placed in an unihabitable environment, no matter how many engineers you put in, it was a known bug. So I had to design a cheap repair platform and perform a zillion micro transactions to get around the problem, and this kind of spoiled the elegance of the whole idea.
Which was primarily to provide *cheap* and easy containment and training facilities for a lot of young officers, with the benefit of getting some *free* population contentment.
Does anyone know if this has been fixed in the meantime? Is it possible in version 6.3 to keep fighters maintained in appropriately equipped PDCs?