Getting rid of "loose fighters" has already been done over in
A Call to Arms: Noble Armada; as handled in a line from
Fleets of the Fading Suns:
In addition, fighters may no longer be purchased without a carrier.
Also,
FotFS added in a set of "standard" fighter complements for each carrier currently available in
ACtA:NA. A handful of fighters have a discounted cost listed for swap-ins, while others would have to be paid for using the standard point values in the various fleet lists.
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To give one example of this change,
House Hawkwood originally had two fighter types available to them in the core
ACtA:NA rulebook; the
Fitzhugh-class fighter and the
Kestrel-class torpedo bomber. At the time, their carriers started off with their hangar bays empty; so you had to pay for each additional fighter (10 points for the
Fitzhugh, 20 for the
Kestrel) to fill them up yourself.
However, as of
FotFS, all Hawkwood carriers now get a standard complement of
Fitzhughs for free; while the upgrade cost of swapping each one for a
Kestrel is now +5 points. (The new fighter type added in the second module, the
Aurora stealth fighter, is +10 points.)
To give these figures some context, the two main fleet carriers that House Hawkwood currently has available are the
Malcolm light carriers and the
Osprey heavy carriers. The
Malcolm and
Osprey have Craft scores of 8 and 18 respectively; plus Carrier traits of 2 and 6 to cover how many they can launch from their bays in a single turn.
Each
Malcolm costs 150 points, while an
Osprey clocks in at 490; given how many fighters they can carry, the new rule changes make taking them considerably cheaper points-wise than they had been hitherto. (A fully-loaded
Osprey had cost 670 points just with
Fitzhughs, and even more if you took one or more of the more powerful fighter types instead.)
And they aren't even the most fighter-heavy faction in the
Fading Suns universe; that honour goes to the
Kurgans.
And yet, despite these changes made in order to make carriers more viable to use, and despite that setting going with a one-fighter-per-base model (as opposed to the flights from the
B5 days), it still seems to hold together well enough.
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If a similar concept were to emerge in
ACtA:SF, one could take the sample
BoM Fed CVS and make similarly streamlined choices; yet ones which are still considered to be valid (pending formal publication, at least) by ADB.
So, a conversion of the
BoM strike carrier would be said to have F-18s as standard; specifically, F-18s based on the version you see on the playtest Ship Card (two phaser-3s, two drones, and nothing else). The F-15 and A-10 (again, strictly based on the
BoM samples; two phaser-3s and a photon for the A-10, and one Phaser-G and four drones for the F-15) would be available as upgrades; but the fighters themselves would not have any of the more intricate loadout or upgrade options from
SFB. (Save them for a Star Fleet Universe port of
Blue Shift.)
If the goal is not to make carriers overly cheap (the way they currently are in
ACtA:NA) then you would still oblige a player to pay for each F-18 the ship comes with, and then insist on a premium for swapping one or more out for an A-10 or F-15.
Over on the Klingon side of things, something similar could be doen for the D7V; stick with Z-Ys and Z-Ds (again, based on those shown on the sample Ship Card; two phaser-3s and four drones for the Z-Y, and one phaser-3 and a disruptor for the Z-D) and state which fighter type the ship carries as standard. (I forget which off the top of my head.)
And for the Kzintis,
their playtest BoM carrier has only one fighter type anyway; I think they are more or less based on the TAAS, but I'm not 100% certain on that.
Oh, and accccording to
the playtest BoM fighter/carrier rules, no more than one drone can be fired from a fighter per turn; it might be wise to keep that rule here, too. (Doing this would mean that the F-15 upgrade buys you more turns the fighter can stay on the board as an effective unit before it has to come back to its carrier for re-arming; but doesn't actually give you a heavier drone throw-weight over the F-18 in any given turn.)
On the otherr hand, since
ACtA:NA has dogfight rules, and modifiers, already, keeping the
SFB digfight ratings would make sense; though, as with
BoM, I would sooner see dogfight drones skipped altogether.
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Actually, I did a sample of what an Omega equivalent of this setup might look like
over in the other thread, with a Mæsron space control ship offered along with representative fighter and PF types.
All in, my first shot at the units involved has the SCS, plus fighters and gunboats, come to 910 points, just with the standard squadron and flotilla compositions; that should give an example of how much of a player's allocation points they would have to assign to take even one of these units into battle.
(Granted, much of that additional cost is from the gunboat flotilla; but a standard 8-4-2 squadron as used by the Mæsron Alliance would still add 240 points to the cost of a given fleet carrier, even if the ship had no gunboats to worry about.)
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If you stick with charging a player for each fighter his carriers are obliged to take, the overall costs of fielding fighters add up pretty quickly; which, in and of itself, would help put a natural brake on numbers used, and make sticking with the same kind of single-fighter bases seen in
ACtA:NA not overly much of a hassle... so long as the fighters themselves go through a "
Borders of Madness filter" rather than have all of their bells and whistles ported straight over from
SFB.
