Will fighters be cheap and easy to produce cannon fodder?

[delray]

I think that's actually the biggest weakness of X3 games, that fighter ships are both expensive and a huge chore to equip once purchased. If you could just have an own shipyard which would spit M5s, M4s and M3s (or whatever they are called in Rebirth) like it was a cheap Indian car factory, we could have swarms of them and while it'd still cost us money, sending 50 fighters against 50 suddenly wouldn't mean having to spend the entire following day replenishing the fleet.

So please make fighters relatively cheap and easy to replace with own production and non-problematic repairs.

[Jumee]

everyone who has problems outfitting fighters should really read this I can outfit 100 fighters faster than two destroyers with it

but on topic - its not clear whether we have fighters at all, a somewhat similar conversation was in a recent carrier thread, where myself and a someone else pointed out that it is not clear whether we will have fighters or no at all

it could turn out that there is just a variety of drones (assault, torpedo etc) that come with all the needed guns/shields/etc from the start and do not need to be outfitted at all

same goes for costs I doubt that they are too expensive. Note "too", they probably wont be cheap if they are strong, if they are weak than still as you will need hundreds to win relative price wont be cheap, because if it was than there would be no need in destroyers, right?

[brucewarren]

All together now (to the tune of the Monty Python Spam song)

Drones, drones, drones, drones. Everybody loves drones ...

I have some drone questions. One advantage of fighters is that the
survivors of a battle don't run out of energy and explode.

Can we have drones that don't explode after a few minutes flight?

Also, can we have the "attack shields" command available for drones?

[Vechs]

If they did away with traditional manned fighters, that'd be fine with me.

It also just makes sense, from a lore standpoint.

Given the durability of an X-universe fighter, piloting one is completely suicidal, not just for combat, but for daily civilian life as well.

If I was living in the X-universe, I would never want to go into space on anything smaller than an M6.

Piloting fighters is for computers or for humans with remote control.

[THE_TrashMan]

If you can bulk-order/produce ships with a specific loadout, that would solve all problems.

[Noimageavaiable]

[Geek]

I hope that drones and fighters will be expensive and not throw away products. Since you no longer fly fighters, there must be some counterpart to avoiding death risk.

[shilhi]

[THE_TrashMan]

[Noimageavaiable]

[TonViper]

They already figured out a counter to that one around the time of WW2 in real life. It was used for torpedo guidance on submarines before the self guided torpedos became common.

What you do is you randomize the frequency of the signal as well, thus preventing the enemy from effectively jamming it. And of course there exists a way of keeping the frequency synchronized between the carrier and the drone, or sub and torpedo as the case may be.

[delray]

Imagine fighters and corvettes you can produce by yourself in a complex with the preset design (Centaur with CIG and HEPT + 5 PRG Novas), so you can attach a solid patrol force to each of your UTs...

You could make hulls and guns endlessly and replace losses with new production or increase military presence if your patrols are strong enough to not take losses.

This way pirates could be more common, Xenon raids could be endless, and in general all the unarmed freighters we're currently using would be more doomed to attack than strongly defended ones.

Game would suddenly become more fun economically, if safety and profits had a price tag attached to it, which you could pay in ships and resources,r ather than missions to calm pirates down.

[Noimageavaiable]

[The Cuban Nightmare]

Well, we saw in those screen shots that there are different tiers of fighter drones like in the other X games, so I can't imagine it's much of a stretch to envision cheaper versions of each drone that could be more disposable.

Also, I figure that capital ships like carriers will have special types of drones that are too large to be used with the PoA and are essentially fighters that you buy preassembled.

What would be really cool is if they let us design specific types of carrier based fighter drones or change their loadouts for specific missions etc. I just can't imagine there only being one size of drone and launching them all from the PoA. The PoA is only an M6 size or thereabouts so it doesn't make sense to have it carrying "big" drones. Of course, that's just my own two cents.

[THE_TrashMan]