After a lil’ fiddling I found a few things out:
1. You can indeed add another class of fighter to the game and change the stats on its beams and how may torpedoes it has.
2. If you add another fighter type, the carrier is loaded with one type or the other at random, not a mix of both. So, you’ll get a whole loadout of Fighter type “A” or Fighter type “B”. And it’s not back and forth either, I literally would restart as soon as I saw what types of fighters were on the carrier, and 3 games it would be type “A”, then the next time, type “B”, then “A” again, the 2 games loaded with type “B” etc.
3. Fighters cannot have more than 1 type of torpedo. I tried creating a bomber with both homings and nukes, and only the homings registered and were able to be fired.
4. Even though the carrier vesselData says it can carry “5 fighter and 2 bombers” when I tried to use the ship class “player bomber” rather than “player fighter” on my 2nd type of fighter it didn’t add the 2 more ships to the carrier, it just added the 5 standard fighters, so no using that method to mix bombers and fighters on a carrier as of yet.
5. Changing the type of torpedo the fighters carry has -STRANGE- effects on the ordinance, at least at first glance. I changed it so that the fighter should have been carrying 4 nukes (changed the torpedo type in same format as standard fighter but as is listed on normal ships). When I launched the fighter had 145, yes that is one-hundred and forty-five, torpedoes! LOL! Even stranger though, was that when I fired on a Kralien Cruiser it took only 3 of these torpedoes to -completely- destroy it without ANY beam fire or other ordinance from a base or NPC vessel or capital ship. Granted I was only on difficulty 1 for testing, so I’m not sure if standard homing torpedoes can do that kind of damage or even if the increased damage homings from the TSN mod can do that. Someone will have to clarify. But if that’s the case, for some weird reason even though I had the amount listed as 4, I was carrying 145 nukes on the fighter! LOL!
At any rate, that’s what I got from about an hour or so of fiddling with vesselData on the fighters and testing them. if we were to do anything with multiple fighters and bombers based on this research we’d have to have 2 separate carriers and hope that one randomly had the “bombers” and the other the fighters. Or, if there was a way the GM could choose which carrier had which type of fighter that’s another way. Either way there’s no way to have both types of fighters on one vessel that I’m aware of. So, we’ll have to wait on the official bomber release for that.
In the meantime however, the fighters are still awesome in and of themselves, and we can always tweak fighter stats to have fun with them.