Just a few tips to do with as you will.
1. A 'fighter', as far as the Aurora engine is concerned, is any craft with a total displacement of 500 tons or less. While you can certainly build larger craft and call them fighters, you'll still have to use regular shipyards to build them as opposed to fighter factories, not to mention they'll need bridges if they displace more than 1000 tons.
2. Fighters, which are often too small to mount appreciable amounts of armor or shields, need to be fast, otherwise they'll die like flies. A good number to aim for is approximately 2 to 5 times faster than fleet speed, as speed is a fighter's armor in a sense. I'd imagine the reason you're having trouble getting your fighters to go a decent speed is because you haven't researched engine power multipliers yet. Fighters become much more useful when you can design engines with 3x the engine power at the cost of reduced fuel efficiency.
3. I'm not really sure what you're intending to use your Micro Aeon or Aeon Harness tugs for. The hangars are far too small to mount much of a fighter wing, and they're very slow to boot. If you're in need of ships that can refuel and resupply your fleets, a commercial design might be better for anything that won't be used as a collier (magazines are considered military equipment).
4. Your Sentinel class Carrier has a fuel capacity of 1M liters and mounts a strike force of only 3 fighters. The entire strike group has total fuel capacity of 15k liters. This means you can refuel your strike group nearly 67 times before you run out of fuel. Your carrier will probably be able to refuel itself much more frequently than that, so you could cut the fuel capacity in half or more and add a bit more hull space for more armor or other components.
5. Everything seems to be a carrier in your fleet. You're probably better off having one large carrier design that can cart a considerably sized strike force around. An individual fighter isn't going to do you much good, fighters generally need to be deployed in swarms to be effective. My advice would be to shift your navy toward 'surface' combatants until you have shipyards capable of building a decent sized carrier (20-25k tons displacement or larger)
6. You need a dedicated sensor platform. Sensors are fairly expensive, and good ones take up a lot of space, so having one ship designated for command and control can be a good idea AS LONG AS you protect your fleets. Big sensors can give your position away from a long distance, and detected carriers will often become dead carriers, especially if their fighters are away on a sortie. The Command class Sentinel will do a decent job finding missiles out to your max range of 5. 2M km, but you need another sensor with a resolution of 16-20 to detect small craft/fighters at long range, and a resolution 100 sensor to find ship sized targets at long range.
7. You need point defense escorts. You don't have any AMMs to speak of, and missiles are probably the most effective means of intercepting enemy ASMs (though the costs will mount over time, not to mention the added logistics) I'm not sure what kind of missiles you can cook up with early tech, but you should aim for something that has a range of about 5. 2Mkm (the max range of your Res 1 sensor against missiles), a WH rating no higher than 1, and with as much agility as you can cram into a size 1 missile. Then, of course, you'll want to design a dedicated missile escort for that part of your point defense umbrella. You might not be able to design a cost effective area defense ship with your tech, so instead, make gauss turrets that track at the highest speed you can design a fire control for. Having your last line of missile defense being about 10k km out might make you and your ship commanders a little nervous, nothing comes close to being as cost effective as gauss turrets in the point defense role.
8. I suspect this is because you also lack the tech for power multipliers on missile engines, but your missiles are slow. The Ballista mounted on the Tribal class is an utter waste of resources. It will be intercepted by anything with a halfway decent tracking speed. When it comes to mounting missiles on fighters, it's all about the alpha strike. Meaning, you want each fighter to be able to launch a big salvo of missiles at the target before heading back to rearm. That way, you might end up with something like 50 salvos of 10+ missiles. A lot of PD setups will have trouble dealing with all those missiles. Again, I'd advise shelving your fighters until you research engine power multipliers. As a general rule, I like my missiles to go AT LEAST twice as fast as the targets they're designed to intercept. This isn't the main issue with the fighter mounted Ballista, its main problem is that it has way too much fuel and not enough warhead. Considering the MFC on your fighter has a max range of 1. 4m km, and the range of the Ballista is 663. 5M km. . . you can stand to significantly reduce the fuel capacity, raise the warhead strength, and end up shrinking the whole system down to a size 2 or 3 missile, which will end up raising the speed.
9. The missiles on your Lasher class (which is a ship you should probably never field. In a combat situation, they're likely to suffer unsustainable losses. ) have much better speed than the missiles on your Tribal class, and the range is more consistent with your fire controls and sensors, but they're all, inexplicably, WH 1. Typically, you're only going to use WH 1 missiles for the anti-missile role, or perhaps for anti-FAC/FTR duty. Anything meant to be used against a ship should have a WH of at least 4. Now, you could certainly sandpaper your enemy to death with thousands of WH 1 missiles, but I don't think you want that to be your fleet doctrine. Anyway, if nothing else, ditch the size 1 missiles, redesign your size 2 and size 4 missiles, and design an AMM.
10. The Sentinel Scout class is actually a pretty good ship for low tech. But the hangar decks are pretty much wasted space. The missiles still need a redesign, but once that's done, you can probably standardize the design to use just one missile size. The box launchers should probably be stripped off as well, unless you plan on designing a much larger ship to dock the Sentinel Scout at so it can reload. Otherwise, a 5 hour reload at a maintenance facility is just far too long.
In summation, as I've stated previously, until you have the tech for engine power multipliers, fighters aren't going to be much use to you, and carriers that can only launch a bare handful of fighters cannot effectively project power. Instead, concentrate on 'surface' ships, design classes to be used as part of a PD umbrella (As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to spend the money and resources to put together a stellar navy, ships designed to protect that investment should comprise as significant percentage of your fleet's total displacement), a dedicated sensor platform with Res 1, 16-20, and 100 sensors. Missiles will likely be your main offensive and defensive weapons as low tech beams don't really have the range to do anything particularly useful. Once you start to advance in tech, however, missile armed fighters will become a much more viable option for the offensive 'punch' of your fleets, while the bulk of fleet tonnage can be used for carriers and defensive ships. Also, it'd be a good idea to try and squeeze some armor onto your ship designs, as it is, none of them can take much punishment before going 'kaboom'.
