*Warning - no AI support*
Available on Imagemodserver:
http://imagemodserver.mine.nu/other/...Mods/GritEcon/
GritEcon has decent fighters:
Ship vs Fighter weapons have limited effectiveness in both directions.
In order to attack ships, you need to design bombers, which are naturally slower and poorly armored. They shoot actual seekers too
In order to get your bombers to the targets, you need to clear the enemy's defensive fighters with your own attack fighters.
As an added bonus, you can research components for your fighters that allow them to shoot down enemy missiles, and thus act as mobile point defense (which is lacking on ships)
Ship/Base point defense is handled by missiles, so it is basically impossible to get an efficient spread of defense fire. A healthy mix of overkill and untargetted units means that ships alone will have a tough time whittling down a fighter squadron, but not be totally ineffective either.
The fighter-Users also have to consider group size much more important. The ability to concentrate fire is proportional to the number of fighters per stack. The losses you take from ships is inversely proportional though.
Also, since ship PD is so weak, missiles are less powerful than regular weapons. They still fire from extreme range, and in this mod never fizzle out, but they suck down hundreds of supplies and do less damage/kt/turn compared to all other weapons of similar tech level.