eh. I see no reason as to why a torpedo with a good damage to power usage ratio coupled with a large size that promotes mounting on a hardpoint like modern fighters carry that is slow but packs enough of a punch to disable systems with a well aimed shot.
A large, hardpoint-mounted, high-damage torpedo could just as easily be mounted on a larger ship as on a fighter; the large ship just builds a bay/battery/giant wing and however long it takes to reload it takes to reload. If they're actually useful against other caps, someone will figure out a way to use them on board a cap. If it's basically dumb-fire, then it might be pointless to do so obviously; and if it's too inaccurate it might make it so it's just a difficult/useless weapon for anybody (fighter or cap).
However, that weapon
existing doesn't do much for
survivability of fighters, they'd still need to get close enough to fire. If you plan to mount the torpedo-equipped fighters in a cap and launch them when the caps are close together, that's a different strategy than the wolf-pack we've mostly been talking about (then it makes more sense to just include dumb-fire missiles and drop fighters again). From this quote:
I'd consider fighters more as a sort of 'smart missile' being deployed by another capital ship rather than being considered direct equals that could take on a defended cruiser one-on-one.
It sounds like that's kind of the direction the devs are planning for (carrier/battlestar-type combat).
I like the double-shield idea; if you make bubbles much more powerful/efficient than hull-huggers, it could help make fighters viable in direct combat. Fighters/smaller craft wouldn't need the power-hungry hull hugger to survive, anything that got that close would crash anyway. Large ships would have neigh-penetrable bubbles, but fighters could penetrate those and go to work on the inner stuff. Might even make sense to have bubbles be aggregate shields while the hulled-version are something else; again assuming fighters can get close somehow in the first place.
The Devs seem to want to make small craft at least somewhat viable, and so they will be. IRL larger ships don't always have an insurmountable advantage, i.e. torpedoes, hypersonic missiles, nukes. When giant capital ships are truly unstoppable, it's just not fun for other players. The more plausible approaches to combat, the better.
I'd argue it's a case of field conditions. Larger ships IRL may not have insurmountable advantage, but it's because you can field non-ship weapons against them (subs, aircraft, orbital strikes, etc.). Larger ships do have a neigh-insurmountable advantage against surface combatants; Battleships typically win against smaller surface vessels when in the open ocean, and the situation we've got in space is most similar to that of an open ocean with only surface vessels available. If all ships are equipped with nukes, it wouldn't make sense to field battleships, so everyone would ride around in PT boats. Even if torpedoes exist, no PT boat is getting close enough to my battleship to use them, since I can see it first (my large size allows better optics) and when I can see it it's in my range.
I agree with the premise, smaller ships
should be viable in game: I do not agree that they automagically will be without some grand design on how combat should work. This isn't the kind of think you can come in and slap on later, it
has to be inherent to the game. Last I checked in on Starmade, they were facing basically this problem: Large ships
own small ships, every time; and any attempt to adjust that made it so large ships were pointless. It doesn't work to just adjust the values of damage done for X blocks, or to taper shield-power off, because then balance sways one way or the other. It needs to be a combination of many factors working
just so to allow multiple classes to have a real, fun, place in combat.
My best suggestion to that end thus far is the one using multiple "spaces," which basically seeks to emulate seagoing combat. Snowdragon's one about interceptable cap-fire is good, but it places fighters into a secondary role (which isn't what I'm reading many of you as wanting). Launching fighters from a bay as missile-carriers also seems against the spirit of the fighter-desire as that places them
aboard capital vessels meaning that, as a player, you'd still need a cap to fight a cap.