If you've ever wondered why all space games make their ships into an allegory of naval vessels, here's why; the functional distinction between navy and air force vehicles is that if a naval vessel suffers disabling but repairable damage, it's simply knocked out of the fight temporarily. If an airforce vehicle suffers disabling damage, it crashes.
Self reparability is the key here. A 'ship' in SS is big enough that any damage it takes, given enough time and supplies, it can just float and fix it on its own. A 'fighter' however isn't big enough to hold enough supplies to a self-repair, nor are they structurally redundant enough having sustained critical damage to be capable of fielding a repairing expedition (see: the prospect of climbing out onto the wing of a jet liner to fix an engine before it hits the ground).
Also, fighters in SS are small enough that few of them have enough armor not to take serious damage if their engines gets blown out and they collide with another ship, whereas ships don't have this problem in SS as in real-life (anymore).
Basically, if you were to change one thing in SS to take it from a naval allegory to an airforce allegory it would be to remove the ability to repair hull outside of a dock, so that after a serious battle no matter how many supplies you have or time you've got, in order to recover from damage you have to return to the nearest market, and if a ship is disabled and recovered it's mothballed until you can dock it again.