The whole point with fighters is to launch a large enough volley to knock out the enemy high value targets so they need to retreat, that is a Strategic victory which is what is important in war. When you use fighters the whole point is using them as to mask where the carrier is located. This is pretty much how real world carrier operations are meant to function. Approach vector from fighters say nothing on where the carriers are in any way.
The fighters will usually be able to carry more missiles in one volley than comparable ship tonnage, this is what matters in fighter combat, getting that heavy strike to the target and do it in such a way your own strike force remain hidden. They can then dock and if the enemy does not retreat they can reload and strike again. This is of course the optimal way an engagement should go but rarely will.
Fighters are also allot cheaper to research and develop than comparable ships to, not to mention maintain and replace when new technology comes around. Hangars is also very cheap and something that remain cheap throughout the entire game, this make carriers relatively easy to maintain and cheap to upgrade.
I also dislike the combat efficiency term, efficiency means nothing if you can't use it effectively... small ships/fighters are more dynamic. The main benefit of larger ships is their capacity to withstand damage and defend themselves. Fighters and FAC are more dynamic as an attack platform, the large ships are mostly for support at least until you have advanced cloaking systems or very early in the game when you don't have enough fighter technology.
I disagree.
Let's assume a 10,000 ton missile warship can dedicate 4,000 tons to launchers, magazines, and fire controls. A 1:2:1 ratio between them seems reasonable, so that's 1,000 tons in launchers, 2,000 tons in magazines, and 1,000 tons to one 750 ton sensor and one 250 ton fire controls. Let's also assume that a 10,000 ton carrier, being slower, can dedicate 5,000 tons to hangars, magazines, crew berths, and spare fuel. If the overhead is 20%, then the carrier can support 4,000 tons of fighter. Fighters normally need to dedicate 40% of their tonnage to engines, and miscellaneous stuff is likely to consume another 20%, so they'll only be able to dedicate 40% of their mass to launchers and fire controls. Assuming a 3:1 ratio, that's a total of 1,200 tons of box launcher and 400 tons of fire control, across perhaps eight fighters. So the fighter-carrier can deliver an alpha-strike twice as large as the missile warship. Except the latter can
sustain that, since it has perhaps four times the magazine capacity. In order to match magazine capacity, the fighter complement needs to halved, which brings their alpha-strikes more in line with each other. So a carrier effectively becomes slower missile warship with greater range but terrible reload rate.
But we haven't considered the sensor issue. Assuming resolution-optimised fire controls, the 250 ton MFC on the missile warship [root(10)*5=15.81x] will actually be able to engage the fighters at greater range than the fighters' 50 ton fire controls [root(200)*1=14.14x] can engage the warship. And notice how the warship comes equipped with its own sensor, while the fighters must either rely on an external sensor or have a quarter of the carrier's alpha-strike chucked to incorporate a sensor-fighter. Then there's the issue of ECM and ECCM, which larger ships have the tonnage to equip, unlike fighters.
There's also the fact that the faster missile ships will have greater strategic mobility, and can literally blitz through hostile territory faster than carriers can react. Any allied system, especially on a border with a hostile state, is likely to be a host to DST networks that will instantly see anything and everything trying to enter the system, not to mention that most players stick a sensor buoy on every jump point they run across. If you're invading hostile space, I see little reason to deal directly with a carrier fleet when it can be dealt with through siege tactics. The point of a war is to seize enemy worlds, not burn their fleets. The ideal way to deal with a carrier threat is to run for the hostile colony while fending off missile attacks with AMM spam, and then either drop ground forces or bombard the population into submission, gaining access to their DSTs and cutting off the carriers from resupply. Of course, this works for everything.
Perhaps I'm biased, but most of my doctrine revolves around being able to rapidly deploy wherever I need to, and this demands
speed. Faster ships are better at concentrating forces and responding to threats, and faster ships demand bigger and more expensive engines, which get expensive to replace. Older ships are quite often far too slow in comparison to contemporary warships to be very useful, so it isn't worth it to keep them around.
Of course, there's no right or wrong way to play Aurora ....
