Overall, I like the ideas expressed in the new changes. The devil's truly in the details, however:
1. If a Talon's worth 0, and a Broadsword is worth 8, where does that put the fighters that are actually almost vaguely worth using, like Lightnings?
I think that fighters, in general, should get re-balanced pretty heavily before they're assigned numbers. For quite some time, it's been rather obvious that most fighters simply don't have a distinct role where they're superior and distinguished enough.
For example, there isn't an Interceptor with a Beam that can effectively counter enemy fighters. There is a fighter that was intended to have that role, but it's no longer effective.
In general, the concept of Interceptors is very much realized in the breach in the current build; instead of having some pretty good hard-counter fighters that are rubbish for most other tasks, we have "interceptors" that can't intercept or take real damage vs. general-purpose fighters that don't have significant disadvantages. Thoughts on this: perhaps an "interceptor" has greatly superior speed and a good rate of turn, but cannot kite and has largely fixed-forward weapons, so that they're good for killing individual fighters and perhaps for focus-killing a Frigate, but are pretty much junk otherwise, because of PD?
I'd also like to see a new type of Fighter that is specifically intended for scouting; this is something that's a distinctive role IRL.
2. I'd really like to see shield-less fighters be rarer and have more distinctive reasons for existing at all, largely because of how moot this entire part of the game becomes if you have enough Tac Lasers around. This is a design relic from the early days where shield-less ships were much more common that I think should be addressed.
3. The biggest core-concept thing that I didn't see distinctly addressed was "will Fighters still consume Crew at a rate that makes them fundamentally un-attractive?".
4. I like the idea of the carrier controlling the Wings very much; I like the burst-launch idea very much. Here the details are going to matter considerably, however; if it's a generic "generation score" and it roughly corresponds to the carrier's total power... what's to stop a player from opti-maxing around the best fighters that can be burst-launched, in terms of alpha? Why bother having 6 Wings, for example, when you can just have 2 that are really good that you can regen at will?
On the converse side, how this gets balanced for the one-Wing carriers is a bit tricky. Basically, both the burst rate and the OP costs make for a weird mechanic. "Oh, I can't have a Gemini with a decent Wing, because OPs say it's not viable" doesn't really sound all that Fun; it'll tend to funnel players even more than how it is now, where a lot of the carriers don't make sense to use.
5. How the AI strategically uses its fighters in large fights should be addressed. Essentially, I think that it'd be great if the AI would use fighters to scout and to initiate hostilities quite often, rather than the gradual mixed bag of Frigates that are faster than Fighters mixed up with other stuff that happens in Vanilla.
This ties into other things about the larger battles; in general, a larger battlefield size might heighten the value of fighters, as well as fundamentally addressing their major issue, which is that they simply must move faster than other ship classes to be all that relevant.
Those are the major details I think I'd look at here; the overall plan really looks very solid and I like where this is going, but this is a feature where a balance pass would really make it feel ready, I suspect.
