What are people's proposals to balance fighters or bombers on an Astral, Heron, or Drover, versus on ships like a Mora, Legion or Odyssey? The former ships have bomber and fighter focused ship systems, while the others don't. If bombers are balanced on a Legion, then the Astral is going to want to spam them compared to normal weapons, simply because the ship ability can effectively double the damage delivered. What should the Astral sacrifice relative to the Legion for that effectively doubled bomber damage? Is it the brawling capability? Or do we want to make fighters a sub-optimal choice if you don't have a related ship system, so that the decision to take a heavy blaster over a bomber on the Astral makes sense?
The fact that people don't tend to load Legions up with Tridents or Daggers (I'm assuming a lot with that statement) indicates we're kinda close to where you want to be in terms of a balance point.
The Astral, Drover, and Heron tend to put the most OP into fighters and/or bombers because they have ship abilities which magnify the benefits of fighters and bombers. If a Hammerhead had universal mediums, you'd still put ballistics in those medium slots because the ship system does so much more with them. Even with access to mod energy weapons or missiles. The ships you don't see sacrificing everything for more fighters are exactly the ones you wouldn't expect to. The ones that don't have bonuses to fighters or limited slots relative to their class size.
Given not every player slaps converted hangars on every destroyer and above and drops a Trident in there, clearly at some point fighters/bombers do become too expensive relative to guns for a given ship hull. The game design question is, what is that point? And how does it slide with fleet size and fighter concentration. A single flight of talons isn't that powerful in 1 on 1. 40 flights of talons becomes a large force multiplier in a fleet situation. A single flight of Sparks in a 1 on 1 is a nice damage source. 40 flights of Sparks in an end game fleet vs fleet will wipe the opposition.
Do you balance for the beginning of the game or the end game? Do you balance for the carrier specialists or the carrier generalists? Do you introduce some new mechanics to prevent fighter concentration at end game?
Right now, I see the options and choice coming at the level do I pick an Astral, a Legion, or an Odyssey for my fleet. The Astral is a specialized carrier, and is great at that job. The Legion gets no bonuses to bombers, but has a maneuverability system which can strategically reposition itself to chase or get to support range of allies quickly when pulled in mid-battle as reinforcements. An Odyssey has both strategic and tactical speed superiority, with better flux stats than either, but fewer fighters and shorter effective range on its big guns. I see nothing wrong with ships that want to focus on fighters. We have ships that want to focus on missiles, or large mount weapons, or speed.
Fighter balance overall probably needs some tweaking, but I'm not sure it necessarily needs to be tweaked to the level of making the Astral want to mount more flux dissipation/capacity and heavy blasters instead of daggers and tridents.