Particle Beams

[liveware]

Seems you are right. No spinal mounts for particle beams. Lasers only. Oh well, standard mount PB fighters will still be interesting to test.

[consiefe]

If PB strenght 2 is 250t it would destroy the purpose of PB weapon on fighters. One S2 PB does worse than railguns. I think PB fightets are just not practical. Actually I still couldn't find very much uses for fighters. Gauss fighters can not hit anything reliably and they eventually got shot. Box launchers take a long time to reload. Fighter mesons are very short ranged so fighters should be very fast to avoid getting shot down. I'll now try lasers and rails to see the situation.

[liveware]

Fast fighters are definitely the way to go. Actually, that was exactly the design parameter that drove me to fighters and carrier task forces in the first place.

The situation I once found myself in (many years ago now) was that I could not catch NPR ships using my existing tech missile destroyers. Bigger ships would have been horribly resource inefficient. So I needed something fast that could get close enough to engage the enemy, and fighters were the only practical solution I could actually design and build. As I recall, meson fighters were my first successful fighters. I don't remember their exact specs, but they were easily the fastest ships in my territory (> 1000 km/s at least). I was able to chase down and overwhelm a hostile NPR fleet of 5 or 6 10-20 kton ships using about 30 fighters launched from my single (50 kton? can't remember now) carrier. This was in the VB6 era when mesons were very powerful, and these fighters worked very well. I lost one or two but I was able to blockade the NPR home world after this battle, so for me, fighters won me the war.

[Ri0Rdian]

A lot more masochists playing this game than I thought. Way too much micro with proper number of fighters to be worth it. I can do FACs but not too many, fighters would kill me (land, unload, select target, give commanders, replace commanders, repair, refit, refuel, rearm....aaaaaaaaaaaaaa). I would need fighter wings instead of individual carriers to be able to actually use the carriers.

[JacenHan]

Almost all of those things can be done as easily to a hundred fighters as to one, and I personally can't imagine wanting to assign officers manually to any significant number of ships. Between fleet orders, ordnance templates, and combat "Assign to fleet/sub-fleet/class" it isn't that much more difficult than FACs or a fleet of full-sized warships, especially with improved fighter landing orders coming in v1.10. They're more work than other options, to be sure, but not unreasonably so.

[liveware]

I don't find carrier based fighters to be terribly difficult to manage...

Also if one is using beam fighters there is no ordinance micromanagement.

[kenlon]

I don't find carrier based fighters to be terribly difficult to manage...

Also if one is using beam fighters there is no ordinance micromanagement.

How many fighters are on your combat carriers?

[Jorgen_CAB]

Fighters will be even easier to manage in 1.10 as you can now join your squadrons as sub-fleets and land them at the same time, easy...