To Wade’s question about destroyed fighters and picking up ejected pilots, we could work around that and say that the fighters are actually drones, remotely controlled by pilots sitting in a VR chair somewhere on the carrier. A destroyed fighter means that the carrier has one less piece of hardware to launch, but the pilot can just link up to another fighter until the carrier runs out.
That way we don’t have to worry about the RP consequences of our pilots being basically invincible while the ships are decidedly not…