- You could make the fighters have really small hitboxes like Gothars suggested so that the chance to dodge is based on the fighter having a very small hitbox. This makes trying to hit them with an inaccurate gun very frustrating for the player, and because guns have inbuilt inaccuracy it does not actually change the fact that the hit is determined by RNG.
- You could make the fighters have good AI, so that they avoid your gun arcs, camp in the relative blindspots of your turrets firing their guns and dodge bullets which they are fully capable of, such as in the case of this bomber we'd have it just sidestepping the Hellbore shot instead of proceeding with its attack run on its trajectory. This is likely to cause many players to rage and is not an enjoyable experience.
- You could give the fighter an equivalent damage reduction like Hiruma Kai suggested. This makes fighters seem heavily armored. For example if you gave it a 50% damage reduction, then a Broadsword could barely survive two Hellbore shots, while a Kite or Shepherd will die to them. This seems esthetically off. Also note that a 50% damage reduction will result in a 0% chance for a Hellbore shot to kill a Piranha while a 50% dodge chance will result in a 50% chance to kill.
1) You can't aim manually at too small hitbox (if it's going to be few-pixel-sized). Entirely dependent on auto-aim and fighter AI remaining as dumb as it is now will become a necessary feature to hit at all.
2) Best option in terms of gameplay it provides, but probably too computationally intensive. This shouldn't apply to just fighters, frigates are capable of dodging quite a lot too (and currently they do not try to).
3) In a sense it's even worse than pass-through chance, because this makes a dense fighter screen the best form of defense.
One realistic option is to add a random component to fighter movements (and some extra speed, to retain same overall forward speed despite inefficiency). So that a fighter never stands still or moves in a straight line - it should always weave around a bit. And make large fighter groups spread out more, so that they never become too dense target. Ideally, this means that weapons auto-firing at fighters should also not try to hit their exact current trajectory, but add some extra spread (to avoid perfectly missing the fighter with all shots). So the key factors for hitting fighters would be projectile speed and amount/density, not accuracy per se (unless insta-hit or close to that).
Not an original observation here, since people have pointed this out many times, but the current system is strange regardless of whether this change is made or not, because the carrier skills reward you for running a fleet of mostly non-carriers, since you get the most out of them that way.
I've always viewed it as getting the most out of it by having 8 or more wings. It just so happens the a 24 wing fleet and a 8 wing fleet get the same net bonus. 8 Heron's with officers get their fighters back 25% faster with Carrier Group. 4 Drovers with officers get their fighters back 75% faster with Carrier Group. You have no additional incentive to add more than 8 wings, but despite how people feel about it, you save the exact same amount of time on respawning fighters across the fleet either way. Making it a smaller maximum bonus, but increasing the number of wings it applies just make the skill overall weaker and forces you to go all in on carriers. Same thing is if it just applies to 240 DP worth of combat ships - Alex would likely drop the bonus from 50% to 20% for Carrier Group.
Recovery bonus from Carrier Group remains same 4 virtual extra decks, true. But speed bonus from Fighter Uplink genuinely goes down.
The core issue is that with only 15 points, you want to really focus your build. And 2 skills to buff a small portion of your overall fleet that is never going to be player-piloted just doesn't sound attractive enough to me. I already have to cut more important stuff to stay within the 15 limit.
