[Barnacle Bill]

Another way to control excess fighters would be to require fighter bays to launch them, disallow storage of fighters in any other component type as planetary cargo, and make them remember the base from which they took off so that no other fighters could land there while they are gone. To base fighters on a planet, you'd have to build WP's with fighter bays. Landed fighters could still be transfered between their base and another base with sufficient unused capacity in the same sector, by means of cargo tranfer. Having to build the infrastructure to support them before you build the fighters themselves should cut down on the numbers. They could go one further and disallow fighter bays in WP's, so that you'd need to put your fixed defense fighter bays in bases (on which you must pay maintenence). All this would mean a code change in a future patch, though, beyond what we could do ourselves with the text files.