Both from a plausibility standpoint and a gameplay standpoint ( since you have a bit of fighter production capacity as a conventional empire ) it feels strange to me that empires transition to TN tech without air-support typically.
I honestly think it would be better to get rid of ground support fighters as they currently stand and have them be another ground unit type in the same style as STOs - design a weapon pod, choose it in the unit creation window, and get a ground support fighter with some minimal engine/MFC/sensor tonnage in the same manner as we currently design STOs. Build them into a formation (again, just like STOs) and assign them to support a formation with FFD following the same rules as presently. There could be a new base unit class for these (in which case we could just do away with fighter pods entirely, but I digress) or you could choose from the available vehicle classes to customize HP and armor.
This would reduce the insane micromanagement that currently plagues ground support fighters, make the fighters scale much better with AA weapons (plus, reworking AA damage calculations would allow Steve to fix the stupid issue where LAA is
useless until racial weapon strength is 10 or more), and frankly this makes much more flavor sense since air fighters and space fighters are not going to be designed similarly in most cases anyways.
Regular fighters can still do orbital fire support in the same way as any other ship for those who want to keep that kind of flavor, although given the micro involved I'm not sure there's more than 2-3 people in the entire playerbase who actually care about it presently.