"It was pretty slow, only went about 25,000 km/s"
It was pretty slowIf that's slow, what the hell do you call fast!?
For a bomber at Internal Confinement that's pretty damn fast, and at any engine tech below that it's blistering. Five Size 3 Missiles is... okay-ish. Size 3-9 is a decent ASM, while 10-24 is hard hitting, but definitely big. I like Size 5s and Size 10s, but 3s are adequate and you can cram more in per ton. You only need one or two AS elements per formation, so take your bombers, strip out the launchers and MFCS and add Actives... I'm about 70% sure that they can leech off of that AS contact.
Designing carriers:
- Build out your carrier with fuel and deployment enough for itself.
- Now build it out with ammo, MSP, and fuel for a number of sorties before it needs to reload.
- Voila, you have built a functional Carrier.
That's the bare bones of design for a Carrier, and a good starting point.
Designing Fighters:
- Decide on the mission of your fighters.
- Decide how much tonnage you want to dedicated to Engines.
- Decide what your payload will be and how you will allocate sensors.
- Decide on a range and build out fuel, deployment and Engineering / MSP accordingly.
- (Optional) Add some defense like Shields, ECM/ECCM and/or armor.
That's the general gist of fighter design, doubtless others will have plenty to add to it.
Missile ships are generally more cost-effective, but less flexible. Your missile fighter carrier can carry Railgun or Gauss PD fighters and your beam fighter carrier can launch a pre-loaded flight of missile fighters. Your Missile ships are only ever missile ships and are always limited by the range of their AS/MFCS and Missiles, while missile fighters can close in to AS/MFCS range and extend the range of missiles, freeing up weight in the missile itself for things like bigger warheads, ECM/ECCM or in the case of bigger sizes even AS of their own.