There seems to be the old confusion starting again.
Most fighters move eight or more inches a turn, many twelve plus. Your ship generally closes by at least three inches. This means that fighters, which move after your ships and your enemies can loiter outside secondary range, somewhere between eight and twelve, and lunge in on the turn they wish to attack. Unless you are intending to shoot your 3-6 AD beam at fighters at 13 to 35 inch ranges you will not have an 'anti-fighter' shot prior to the fighters getting to broast one ship. The range of the fighters guns is irrelevant, it is the range of the fighters guns + their movement that is the effective strike range you should be considering.
Second myth is that fighters will wear a ship down but not kill it, render it irrelevant. There is no difference between ship AD and fighter AD so if your 4 AD system on a ship is dangerous to another ship the fighter version is just as dangerous. If fighters did not crit in the same way as ship board weapons the arguement would have merit, but if I can drop six to eight T-bolts next to your ships you should be more afraid than if I was able to send my Nova (6 T-bolts having more AD than a Nova broadside) shooting up to you from fifteen inches away. More so because the fighters will shoot first even if you have initative.
Just want the debate framed correctly - fighters are powerful, always have been against the right opponents, but fragile. Most games we play are over in 4-6 turns, or at least all over but the crying, and fighters were easy to deal with for that period due to dogfighting and or short ranged weapons having nothing else to do but shoot fighters. The problem was survivability, not the damage output. Nine flights of T-bolts were simply not a good trade for a Nova and four flights of T-bolts.
Ripple
