[PvK]

True. However, you can get much larger stacks if you launch during strategic movement, particularly from planets. This deployment method has similar effects to deploying heavy anti-ship weapons, but less efficiently. That is, these mobs become more effective against ships than other fighters, because while they can concentrate fire to bLast through heavy armor plating, if they fight other fighters which are deployed in smaller Groups, they will tend to waste shots, since they can only target one enemy fighter group at a time, while the fighters in smaller Groups will never waste firepower firing into a huge stack of fighters.

Also remember that it's not hard to make ships with lots of structure and/or shields in Proportions, using armored structure, which at lower tech levels is very cheap (20/40/80 mins for 60/90/120 structure in a 10kT component). I think there are several designs and methods which can deal efficiently with fighters, without making them at all obsolete. Fleets that are unprepared for fighters though can get completely smashed by them, though. This is exactly what you see in a lot of sci-fi, btw. That is, practically any sci-fi which includes fighters, makes them quite dangerous to ships, especially if they lack their own fighters or other countermeasures.

PvK