[Thei R'vek]

IMHO the best fighter strategy without any of the racial technologies is to use massive amounts of SMALL fighters. My standard Small Fighter design is:

Cockpit
Life Support
8 Engines
1 Small Anti-Proton Beam III

I then set the strategy for the design to "Point Blank" You can build almost 4 times as many of these as you can of Large Fighters in a signle turn and even though you lose massive amounts of them they're a lot cheaper to build and you can get more of them in less time. I haven't actually used a Medium or Large Fighter since about 20 games back and that's after I went and modded all the AIs to be more far more aggressive.