First Fighter

[Borealis4x (OP)]

I did this without any real guidance on how to make fighters specifically, looking only at hanger sizes and applying what I learned making my cruiser.

Lockheed-Martin SF-1 class Fighter    500 tons     7 Crew     160.2 BP      TCS 10  TH 19.2  EM 0
8000 km/s     Armour 1-5     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 4.6
Maint Life 3.98 Years     MSP 20    AFR 20%    IFR 0.3%    1YR 2    5YR 30    Max Repair 20 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 1 months    Spare Berths 3   
Magazine 24   

Sukhoi 20 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (4)    Power 20    Fuel Use 86.47%    Signature 4.8    Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 15,000 Litres    Range 6.2 billion km   (9 days at full power)

BAE Systems Fighter Gauss Cannon R4-8 (2x4)    Range 40,000km     TS: 8000 km/s     Accuracy Modifier 8%     RM 4    ROF 5        1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Renraku Computer Systems  Fighter Fire Control S00.1 24-2500 H30 (FTR) (1)    Max Range: 48,000 km   TS: 10000 km/s     79 58 38 17 0 0 0 0 0 0

Aegis Dynamics Size 6 Box Launcher (4)    Missile Size 6    Hangar Reload 45 minutes    MF Reload 7.5 hours
CACI Intenational Fighter Missile Fire Control FC1-R1 (30%) (1)     Range 1.9m km    Resolution 1

CACI Intenational Fighter Search Sensor MR0-R1 (30%) (1)     GPS 4     Range 640k km    MCR 70k km    Resolution 1

This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes

[Mastik]

1)  I would drop the fuel down to 5000L.  I prefer my fighters to be short range.
2)  I dont like to mix weapons, remove the gauss, and see if you can add more box launchers.  You can create another strictly beam design.
3)  I dont use maint on my fighters, they are not in space long enough to break.

[Herodotus4]

That fighter is very very slow, actually slower then I would expect a light warship to be.  At 8k kps an ASM can hit you without huge difficulty.  Also your sensors will only reach 2/3rds of a million kilometers, which is long distance energy range and for your size 6 missiles is no distance at all.  If you backed the resolution back to 500-1000 tons it would be much better and your fire control has equally short range.  I have been fiddling around with this sort of thing a little and I prefer fighter missiles with 15-20 million kilometers and size 2-3 and making them as fast as possible.  You can fit a bunch of size 2-3 box launchers on a 250 ton fighter and put in 4 per hanger deck.  I have not even thought about energy armed fighters though.

[Iranon]

The design tries to do too many things at once and is terrible at all of them.
There are several directions you could go. I'm fine with low speed if we have decent weapon range and tiny fighters to slip under the quarry's long-range sensors: 1 box launcher, 1 size 1 engine, 1 missile fire control, 5000l fuel, nothing more than needed. Sensors on a separate fighter.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

I also made this dropship that can double as a science team ferry. Plan to put ships like these on everything 60,000 tons and up.

Mako Drop Ship class Dropship    500 tons     8 Crew     139.6 BP      TCS 10  TH 9.6  EM 0
4000 km/s     Armour 1-5     Shields 0-0     Sensors 1/1/0/0     Damage Control Rating 0     PPV 3.8
Maint Life 3.47 Years     MSP 17    AFR 20%    IFR 0.3%    1YR 2    5YR 32    Max Repair 20 MSP
Intended Deployment Time: 1 months    Spare Berths 17   
Drop Capacity: 1 Company    Magazine 12   

Sukhoi 20 EP Magneto-plasma Drive (2)    Power 20    Fuel Use 86.47%    Signature 4.8    Exp 12%
Fuel Capacity 40,000 Litres    Range 16.7 billion km   (48 days at full power)

BAE Systems Fighter Gauss Cannon R4-8 (4x4)    Range 40,000km     TS: 5000 km/s     Accuracy Modifier 8%     RM 4    ROF 5        1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Renraku Computer Systems  Fighter Fire Control S00.1 24-2500 H30 (FTR) (1)    Max Range: 48,000 km   TS: 10000 km/s     79 58 38 17 0 0 0 0 0 0

Aegis Dynamics Size 6 Box Launcher (2)    Missile Size 6    Hangar Reload 45 minutes    MF Reload 7.5 hours
CACI Intenational Fighter Missile Fire Control FC1-R1 (30%) (1)     Range 1.9m km    Resolution 1

CACI Intenational Fighter Search Sensor MR0-R1 (30%) (1)     GPS 4     Range 640k km    MCR 70k km    Resolution 1

This design is classed as a Fighter for production, combat and maintenance purposes

[Iranon]

Trying to do even more things, and is even worse at them.
With speed and armour that low, this is pretty much restricted to capturing commercial vessels.
There's considerable overhead for very limited weaponry.

[Andrew]

The missile fire control is also suicidally short ranged, you don't need resolution 1 and you are not going to be firing your missiles at other missiles so have a resolution for tracking 9,000 ton or larger vessels instead.
I second the far too slow and trying to do to many things on one hull. Build a gauss fighter, missile fighter and an assault shuttle not one hull for all three jobs

[Borealis4x (OP)]

I wanted the missiles to be anti-fighter, hence the small resolution.

What are the best non-missile weapons for fighters? And how fast should they be going at every engine level, generally?

[Iranon]

Beam fighters tend to suffer considerable losses when used offensively, AI opponents like plentiful and long-ranged AMMs.
Microwaves for disabling, Railguns/reduced-Gauss for anti-missile work on the approach and cleanup would be my preferred approach.
I'd try to at least hit the speed of the slowest fighter fire control I can build for beam fighters, 10k in your case... but 20k certainly wouldn't be unreasonable if you have sufficient power multiplier tech.

Speed or may not matter for missile fighters, I've built plenty that were slower than my full-size warships.

[linkxsc]

Thoughts.

Fighters must be fast. Yours is a tad slow for the engine tech. Your fire control system has a tracking of 10,000km/s, that should be your minimum speed.

Fighters should rely on another craft lighting up targets with actives but a micro sensor isnt necessarily bad, and can often spot for a beam fighter itself.

1 weapons system or bust, at high techs you can get away with more, but not at low.

With missile fighters, you load them with shorter ranged but faster or harder hitting asms than normal, as they can approach closer.

With beam fighters, use a mix of weapons, lasers+hpm+mesons are a good combo (most in lasers).
Beam fighters are however often weak and have high losses. They are much better cleanup ships than initial strike.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

Wait, so by one weapon system you don't mean one weapon but one type of weapon?

And I'm guessing the optimal weight is 250 tons, yes? And it should go as fast as the tracking speed of its fire control, ideally?

Should turrets go on some of the larger 500 ton craft?

And I'm guessing that fighters can rely on their mothership's active sensors and EM. Still need a missile computer, though...

[Iranon]

Optimal weight depends on what you're trying to do.

Deliver missiles from outside enemy sensor range? As small as you can make them, your biggest asset is your small sensor footprint. If your weapon range exceeds that of enemy AMMs and you're too small for their anti-ship sensors/fire controls you should be perfectly safe and need neither speed nor armour.
Consider a single box launcher and offload sensors to dedicated spotters: splitting up the same capabilities over more numerous smaller fighters makes you harder to see, point defence is going to be restricted by number of fire controls so each salvo may as well consist of one decent-sized missile for better shock damag/penetration/fuel efficiency.
250t seems reasonable for this, smaller is definitely possible.

Beam fighters that use something other than reduced-size Gauss guns will have to be larger if you want decent speed (which you probably do).
Matching ship and fire control speed seems good practice. It's not set in stone, but you should have a good reason to do otherwise.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

Any rules of thumb for a marine company/science team dropship?

[Iranon]

Very fast, otherwise you are bound to lose most of your marines before combat even starts. Can be absolutely barebones, just a drop module and enough of your most powrful engines to make up 50-60% of its size. You probably want reasonable armour, quarry suppression by microwave-equipped ships or both.

As a team shuttle, I'd use a dedicated craft - just a small low-power engine, the smallest engineering bay and a dash of fuel. These can spend 20 years in space, then be scrapped.
I have to admit, these days I don't really ferry teams manually... too much hassle without any interesting decisions.

[Borealis4x (OP)]

From what has been said I feel like the existing weapon types do a poor job of representing fighter type ships. You can't make things like auto-cannons or gattling guns or other small fighter type armaments. Take the dropship, for instance, I wanted a sort of Halo Pelican-esque gunship type thing, but I'm being told that it needs to be unarmed to make it go faster. Granted, the Pelican didn't carry an entire company, but still... Disappointing.