'Light' fighters like Wasps, Talons or Borers can be dealt with by weapons which would normally be PD, heavier fighters need actual ship guns to break them. But most actual ship guns have issues hitting fighters. I don't want to have to fill a cruiser's small ballistics with Light Assault Guns specifically to kill fighters, because that is almost certainly going to cause a bunch of other issues, but with how fighters currently are it feels like I should do that.
One of the big reasons I'm complaining about this is most vanilla loadouts aren't built with the current fighters in mind, and thus don't have many 'proper' anti-fighter tools
Alrighty then, here's every vanilla non-small weapon I consider to be good vs fighters:
- Energy: Pulse laser, Heavy Blaster, Graviton beam (you're usually gonna have it more than one on a ship), Ion Beam, Phase lance (melts any fighter), Heavy burst laser, Autopulse laser, HIL, Tachyon lance with a swipe, Plasma Cannon (some consider this to be the best fighter killing weapon) and Paladin PD but no one uses that so who cares.
- Ballistics: Assault chaingun, Heavy mauler, HVD, Heavy Mortar, Thumper kinda (but again why even have this), Devastator cannon, Mjolnir, HAG and lastly Gauss cannon which can snipe any fighter a mile away but isn't the best option for the job.
This enough for ya?
EDIT: And let's not forget the best large missile weapon that annihilates everything it sees.
The AI has to be effective with them against fighters. A lot of that is only really effective against fighters when used by the player in specific ways fairly certain. The 'best' solution I've found for fighters so far is actually Scarabs with Tactical Lasers and Advanced Turret Gyros, but that's rather specialized. Beam weapons are generally pretty effective against fighters because they can't really miss.
I'm not convinced Maulers Heavy Mortars can reliably hit fighters. Gauss absolutely cannot under AI direction hit fighters reliably. Heavy Blaster is... it can probably hit fighters but is not exactly something you want to fire at fighters. Thumpers are generally good and probably effective against most fighters, especially when stacked.