I do not think fighters have been nerfed quite as badly as people are making out. Sure I never had a Big Wing Monkey in my gaming group (For which I am quite thankful) but I did find ACTA fighters a little too potent for what they were.
I am broadly in favour of the changes brought in with SFOS in context of the rules changes in SFOS.
They dropped AD on the fighter weapons (except for the Frazi and Nial). Not too bad, a fighter wing often packed more firepower than an arc of a starship (6 flights of Thunderbolts). The Frazi's still have the AD to maintain their reputation of good in an Anti-Ship' roll.
They dropped hull. Its not like you could strap much armour onto a fighter, I always thought that this was better represented as a dodge save, though a small part of the Hull score had to be made up by the difficulty to fire at a fighter. I think this is about right as it stands.
Dodge, did not change.
Wing Size, not really an issue unless you are re-stocking vessels in a campaign (I'll build a new Morshin thanks...), a couple of fighters here or there will not make much of a difference in a game these days. It should probably have been left at it was.
Firing last, a good thing. Lets face it a warship is bound to detect fighters on an attack run and send details to the relevent gunnery crews. But lets face it would they rather remove the Nova dreadnought cruising past with its broadsides rady to fire or the pair of T-bolts priming missiles? A fighter has to get well within a warships 'circle of control' to be effective, and the ship has much, much longer range guns that can be used if necessary.
Precise. I am glad they dropped this from fighters in SFOS. Why? Because it doubles the chance of scoring a Critical hit. Under ACTA I think it raised the odds to 1 in 4, in SFOS it is 1 in 3 with no chance of bulkhead hits. Leaving precise in would be seriously bad news.
What I think is wrong with fighters, and a suggestion to improve them, is their lack of ability to hit something as big as warship. I think Precise was mis-used in this sense of accurate shooting. It might be far better represented with the likes of the AP and Super AP traits. Now some of you will be thinking WTF that will make things too scary. But in a fighters case, there will be none of the Beam, or Double Damage traits lurking around too (unless you are the First Ones). It might make a better representation of a fighter pilot to accutately fire his weapons to cause damage to his target. It will not cause excessive damage, and is likely to score no more damageing hits than any other kind of shot. You are just more likely to hit that huge warship filling your cockpit window.
So we have four types of weapons that could reflect this, Weak, 'Normal' (no trait), AP and Super AP. What might be worth trying is bumping the trait of all fighter weapons (including missiles) higher up the scale and keeping the SFOS AD.
Weak weapons become 'normal'. (e.g. Sentri, Delta-V)
'Normal' weapons become AP (e.g. Star-fury, Frazi)
AP weapons become Super AP (e.g. Nial, Falkosi)
Super AP weapons remain Super AP (I have not noticed any fighters with Super AP weapons)
What do people think?
I have had some thoughts on EA ships too, but I will pst them another day.