As my title says, I'm a Strike Craft wonk (along with related topics), being a little obsessed with how things "should" work in both a general science-fiction sense and in Stellaris in particular. Among the details that I'm trying to make sure I have a clear understanding is the relative size of the individual Strike Craft. As with the major warships, I tend to work in relative sizes versus necessarily absolutes, but getting an idea of how big something actually would be can also be helpful.
I typically use stats within the game to get a sense of relative size. On the major warship side, I look at things from the Wiki like Base Cost, Build Time, Small Slot Equivalent, etc., to reach the conclusion that a Corvette is one-eighth the volume/mass of a Battleship. For a completely arbitrary starting length of 400 meters for a Corvette, a Battleship at 8x the volume would (if proportional) be 2x as long, tall, and wide as the Corvette, meaning 800 meters long in this hypothetical. Slightly off from the other ratios, Base Hull for the Corvette is 300 and the Battleship is 3,000, giving a 10:1 ratio.
I'm then looking at Basic Strike Craft, specifically the Scout Wing, which (in the Wiki) shows a table with Cost (in alloys), Power, and Average Damage that seem to be at the Hangar level, i.e., covering a standard 8-unit wing. But then I look at Shield and Hull in the same table and I'm not sure if that's supposed to be per craft or per wing.
I ask this because, if each craft has 30 Hull points, compared to a Corvette's 300 Base Hull points and a Battleship's 3,000, would that make each craft approximately 1/8th as large (volume/mass) as a Corvette? Compared to the hypothetical 400 meter Corvette above, each Strike Craft (BTW, represented in icon form as a classic starfighter) would come out as 200 meters long. If instead the wing as a whole has the 30 Hull points, it would instead likely make each hypothetical Strike Craft 1/64th the size of the Corvette above, or 100 meters long.
I bring all of this up because how we view the absolute size of Strike Craft should change our view of how they would operate. When currently operating in a space battle, Strike Craft have forward-fire cannons only. This forces them to loop around in their orbit and only attack their target when they are able to point their flight path at it. This means that at only one point in their current orbits are they able to fire on their current target. With a 2.3-day cooldown, Strike Craft would need to complete an orbit every 2.3 days to sync their capability to fire with their opportunity to fire - that's probably not what's happening now, as I've seen many complaints that Strike Craft break off attacking one target to go after another, lather, rinse, repeat, and end up not really focus-firing and actually killing targets efficiently.
If Stellaris were thinking more along the lines of Newtonian physics, Strike Craft (and really all warships) could briefly coast and quickly flip their hulls around to point any forward-fire cannons at any target they want, but the current physics engine doesn't allow for that to show up visually (definitely not the warships, as they turn too slowly). So I wanted to see if it would be reasonable for a Strike Craft to use turrets to keep their warship-damaging guns on target basically all the time. If a Strike Craft was closer in absolute size to a typical sci-fi starfighter (no more than 25 meters), no, it's not really viable. But if that Strike Craft is instead 50, 100, 200 meters long, then yes, it would make much more sense.
Again, the hypothetical absolute size of a Corvette I gave above is driving the values down the line, but that size is also influenced by comparing the Base Cost in Alloys of a Corvette to the Cost in Minerals of Districts and similar planetary projects (and adjusting for conversion rates). If there was a flat equivalency between the costs after adjustment (which I definitely don't agree with), even Corvettes could be well over a thousand meters long and now Strike Craft would proportionally be many hundreds of meters in length (i.e., just smaller full warships, not simply launched craft).
Thinking about Strike Craft in this way presents other opportunities, like classic starfighter-size (e.g., 25m) Strike Craft that could launch from S-slot Hangars on Corvettes in waves of 100+ (but which would only be effective versus the 50m versions, which themselves would only be effective against the next size up, etc.), or legitimizing letting the "full-size" 100-200m Strike Craft have hyperlane capability to patrol for pirates. It's really all just playing with numbers, but I think there are some opportunities to get Stellaris to recreate more of the classic sci-fi battles we've seen in other media.
