Fighter Shields

[Sanginius]

Hi, new player here, I'm trying to work out what causes a fighter to have shields or not. At first i thought it was level of material but then found a lot of fighters for sale without a shield,I'm looking to build my own through a fighter factory, and have worked out the better the turret the better the material the fighter is made out of, and the more points are available for increasing the fighters stats, for a price.

Can anyone explain how to add shields to fighters built in a fighter factory please?

[N.D.I. Entrance]

Fighter shield is not neccessarily a relevant factor in most cases. Most cases, in the instances you get shielded fighters (It happens to me when I use a fighter-blueprint with large shield generators), they only have a few hitpoints worth of shields. Fighters are actually just really small ships in Avorion, which is why they lag the living day light out of computers, especially if they are detailed fighters near the Avorion fighter block limit.

Honestly shields are kinda worthless to fighters, as returned fighters automatically repair any damage (Provided they aren't destroyed from the fight anyways-getting damaged fighters back is rare) they receive. Fighters especially die in mass to anti-fighter ships, like anti-fighter point defense pirates, and bosses like the AI. So range of weapon and the speed of a fighter should be the main consideration, as any closer than 3 km to ships near Trinium levels and you'll start losing fighters and resources quickly.

[Sanginius]

Thanks for the detailed response.

[Atlantika]

fighter shields of anysort are really horrible, for 2 reasons the shield isnt big enough to matter, and if you have swarms of fighters, the lag is crazy for the game trying to generate shields for each one.

[rubydreamer]

Theres 3 main uses for fighters (none of it actually fighting)
Mining (R mining fighters obviously)
Salvaging (Again, R salvage)
Boarding

The first two, they will do many times better than most ships (other than AI captain ships dedicated to mining)
Boarding, they are the only way (in vanilla)

Salvaging fighters, en masse, in scrap yards, is AMAZING!

[Chaoslink]

Originally posted by rubydreamer:

Theres 3 main uses for fighters (none of it actually fighting)
Mining (R mining fighters obviously)
Salvaging (Again, R salvage)
Boarding

The first two, they will do many times better than most ships (other than AI captain ships dedicated to mining)
Boarding, they are the only way (in vanilla)

Salvaging fighters, en masse, in scrap yards, is AMAZING!

Eh, there’s a few more and fighting is part of them. Cargo fighters can be useful in small production chains to sell or transfer goods between stations. I often keep a few squads of plasma fighters on hand when raiding factions so they can work the station shields down while I deal with sector defenders. If you can find some really strong turrets and mass produce them, mass producing fighters using that turret can be pretty nasty too. I’ve had pre-barrier plasma, bolted and other fighters with almost 400 DPS per fighter. If I had all 120 fighters launched simultaneously, most enemies couldn’t get close. Wiping out some 5-6 sectors in a row lost me just two fighters. I didn’t have to kill anything more than maybe 25% of the hostile ships myself as they lasted mere seconds if they got close to me. I could have don’t it fine without them, but the fighters can be amazing even in combat as long as you have enough DPS coming out of them. You just need to know when to use them and when not to.