My main concern has always been a fighter force being picked off by AMM fire before it even gets a chance to get into range.
It is worth noting that Steve said he forgot to set up several of the Battlestar BFCs so the point defense was much less than needed. Given the size of the Cerberus fleet and the fact that defensive stations have much greater proportional throw mass than regular (i.e., self-propelled) ships I think the AMM threat here is somewhat overstated. We must also consider the tech level difference between the Colonial Fleet (NGC/ion drives) and Cerberus
(MP drives). If the Colonial Fleet were to magically have 25% higher ship speeds and tracking speeds (i.e., just +1 tech level), the situation would look much rosier I suspect.
Pretty much every time this has come up in beam fighter discussions I have done analysis of railgun fighters vs AMMs which shows that the fighters can, if properly designed, deal with AMM spam pretty reasonably - the fighters can defend against AMM spam from roughly equal tonnage of NPR missile escort ships, and the fact that fighters require a carrier is roughly balanced out on a tonnage basis by the fact that NPR fleets are never solely composed of AMM escorts. It is not the most exciting play pattern, but you can fairly reliably weather the AMM storm and then close for beam combat as shown in this and I believe other AARs.
The "problem" of AMM spam is really only such when considering a multiple player race scenario where one player race attempts to cheese the game with a pure AMM-spam fleet, in which case it is probably true that fighters (or indeed most other kinds of ships) will be insufficient at the tactical level (although strategically, the cost of AMM spam is quite prohibitive and a beam weapon fleet may suffer high initial losses and then push back if the enemy runs out of AMMs before destroying the entire fleet). However in this case I would argue that cheese is met with cheese, as the player you decide how silly you want things to be as Aurora has (almost) never been balanced around closing exploits if the player would like to use them.
I will concede that when facing a missile opponent, pretty much only railgun fighters will be viable at most practical tech levels, even Gauss fighters are strictly inferior below basically MaxTech level, and laser fighters, etc. are certainly right out to say nothing of the folly of using plasma or meson fighters. That being said not everything should be equally viable in Aurora, and these other fighter weapons can have a place in other situations (except Gauss fighters, never use these except for roleplay purposes, please, I am begging you).
