I personally love having so many fighters, and never have any frame rate issues and all I have is 4 gig vram, 9th gen i3, and 16 gig ram and m2 ssd
Your issue could be somewhere in your hardware: you dont need expensive just the right pieces.
Also, if I remember correctly, java cannot use more than 6 gigs at a time (several people on discord actually told another person this when asking what to set vmparams at. I would be willing to be these people know what they're talking about)
So your issue may be trying to allocate more resources than java can handle; I am not sure if would cause stuttering or frame rate drop, but it wouldnt surprise me.
However, more hullmods more better!
It would be cool to have mods that convert hangar bays into: armor, hull, cargo, fuel, or crew space. Or really anything.
In other games they often refer to "modifiable space" as "mass" and you can just install things. Being able to change cargo space for crew, or whatever tradeoff would be interesting.
Anyway, not sure if you noticed but unless it's in a dedicated carrier bay, the range is only 2000 on any fighter, and unless it matches the warship bay properly, anything other than a fighter uses a LOT of op.
Back in 91a I NEVER personally used carriers (and only ever fielded maybe 2 cruiser carriers, the rest being warships) and I had a pillager with just some free talons because the rest was spent on firepower: that ship wrecked ANYTHING because I has such high alpha damage, including [redacted].
Really, even in vanilla you kind of need a carrier or two, justbfornthe utility of them.
Anyway I dont agree at all that fighters are the "meta" it's more about how you play and whether you know how to counter them.
With that being said, more pd options in a tc that ups the amount of them to a staggering level is definitely a good idea.
I think having a few that are essentially the mortar/basilisk cannon of pd would be appropriate: something high flux with slow reload and INCREDIBLE anti fighter utility, like the vanilla devastator cannon.
also, I really love the new Savoy it looks great