Classification: Light strike craft
Role: Screen the ship, hunt anything small
Fighters are the little craft that come out of a bay. They are not capital ships with the scale turned down. Alone, one of them dies easily. In a pack they finish a wounded hull and they eat torpedoes on the way in.
Kept close, they patrol the ship's flank and meet other small craft in the gap. Let off the leash, they range out and chase. Either way, the wall that stops them is a screen of small, fast guns. A capital gun is the wrong tool for a cloud of gnats, and the gnats know it.
A carrier's trick is the closing. A fighter that gets inside the other ship's shield hits bare hull. That is the whole reason to grow a bay.