Quote from: trabber Shir on April 14, 2025, 09:26:20 AM

With that said, I have no actual experience in ground combat with the new system, or using FFD at all. So my guess that the armor will give me the chance to pull them back to the carrier for repairs may be totally off, thus making the "survivability" completely irrelevant.

This last bit is the incorrect bit. The reality of ground support fighters is that the AI deploys copious amounts of AA to the point that fighters have virtually nil survivability. Even with heavy armor (which is quite inefficient until rather high tech levels), MAA/HAA deal enough damage to eat through armor quite rapidly and the shock damage can destroy a fighter even without an armor penetration. The survivability of ground support fighters is, in fact, terrible in practice, and that's before even getting into the intensive micromanagement involved in using the things.

For as much as people are attached to the idea of aerospace fighters, I don't think I've ever seen ground support fighters actually used in an AAR, which is quite telling.

Agreed. I tried using FFD and fighters all of one game, and as everyone else says, it's not worth using by any metric - cost, effectiveness or micromanagement, they're worthless for all three. Which is a shame, because orbital fire support and airpower are common mainstays of just about any form of sci-fi.

I've only gotten use of fighters when I played with a max+ tech modded db where I went beyond what vanilla allowed. The only way for them to survive is miniaturized shielding as shield hits seem to trigger shock damage

This is one of two major reasons I have suggested that shields should be changed so that their strength scales linearly but their recharge rate scales superlinearly, the opposite of what we have now. This would make small shields usable (and help balance shields vs. armor a bit better).

I did use them in one major planatery invasion in one campaign and after a lot of micromanangement to set them up as the radiocative beverage said they all got shot down and before they died scored almost no hits and most of those did nothing.  They are at most effective as the same tonnage of ground forces , require many, many times more micromangment and have the survivability of a snowflake in hell. Fitting ground support weapons into the missile bays of your actual space combat fighters is worse, they are less effective , at least as vulnerable and vital for your space combat force so you really cannot afford to lose them.
I restarted the campaign with a new strategy

You'd still have to consider the unfortunate mathematics of orbit-to-surface weaponry. A comparison I've done a while ago told me that my destroyer escorts fire 196 10cm railgun (10/20 damage) shots at 5200 BP for ~26BP/shot, and railgun fighters cost me 51 BP/shot, while it costs PW infantry 0.15 BP for a 15/15 shot, and 0.24 BP for CAP infantry to fire 6 such shots. Of course, a specialized anti-GU design (a beam base?) would be far more economical to field, but I don't think even that could overcome a hundred-fold difference in cost-efficiency.

Your cost math sounds like it comes from before the fighter pods were added. A large fighter (400t) with my current tech can have 6 size 25 fighter pods and each pod (if Autocannon) does 3 shots with roughly 4 times the penetration of PWI and twice the damage. To get a comparable effect from a ground unit, I would have to go up to a MAC on a light vehicle (quite a bit less penetration, but as close as I see) which is almost exactly half the cost of the pod.

A design with armor and theoretically good survivability using micromanagement comes in at 175BP plus 30BP for 6 size 25 pods so 205BP versus 15BP (62.5) for ground vehicles which do similar damage. So yes the fighter is 14 times the cost, but you get arguably simpler logistics and much better survivability (in theory). If you used a Ultra-Heavy Vehicle with Ultra-Heavy Armor and all HACs, you would need 3 to roughly match the firepower and that would be 360BP. So Fighters and FFDs are only as stupid (in terms of cost) as the big ground unit types, well within reasonable costs for the role play value.

With that said, I have no actual experience in ground combat with the new system, or using FFD at all. So my guess that the armor will give me the chance to pull them back to the carrier for repairs may be totally off, thus making the "survivability" completely irrelevant.

Well, you learn something new every day. Never though to nest commands, but I am definitely going to give that a shot!