It's a response to the Narada.
But the thing is, in the Starfleet that built Pike's new flagship, nobody
believes in the
Narada. Not even Pike himself, the man who wrote a frigging
dissertation on the subject, remembers the incident for its extremely distinctive, rare and prominent identifying element of a thunderstorm in space, despite first Chekov and then Kirk slapping him in the face with it like a Fish Slap Dancer on acid.
Anyway, every ship in that Starfleet is that big to begin with, including the one that first met the
Narada. And said ship already fared exactly as well in combat with the
Narada as did this "improved" modern ship!
Fighters are likely an expedient way to bulk up raw numbers to spread enemy fire.
What benefit is there in spreading enemy fire? It only takes one phaser beam to hit and destroy a fighter in "Sacrifice of Angels", even if the hit rate is not quite the usual 100%, whilst the firing of multiple beams simultaneously is also demonstrably possible.
Single hits, this time with 100% accuracy, didn't work quite that well against small craft in "Preemptive Strike" yet - but back then, a Cardassian death ray couldn't penetrate a wet paper bag without major assistance, and Evek's ship was already shot to hell at that point anyway.
In contrast, the ship the fighters in "Sacrifice of Angels" were bombarding didn't seem to mind
nine waves of fighter attacks much. She
faked damage to provide an excuse for the Dominion to "break formation" and open a trap for the Alpha Axis ships to enter.
Also, weapons in Trek seem to maintain fairly effective firepower at small scales, while shields at small scale seem to drop in power drastically, so fighters in groups are offensively useful but can't last very long, which seems to be the logic behind the Bird of Prey and Jem'Hadar fighter while carrying far more firepower and working independently or in groups.
But the
Odyssey didn't appear to manage to destroy any Jem'Hadar fighters in her final battle, despite Starfleet-standard death rays and 100% hit rate. Was Keogh just pulling his punches?
We also see runabouts individually effective against Jem'Hadar fighters
In what sense? They did zip to help the
Odyssey, say. The one obvious kill, from "Treachery, Faith and the Great River", depended on the first of those three things, with Weyoun pointing out a weak spot. There never was a repeat of that feat.
while small craft in groups are effective against the Galor class.
In "Sacrifice of Angels", we see them being utterly ineffective, to the point that the enemy has to help them achieve their tactical goal. (We see gasoline explosions, which the preceding DS9 episodes defined as "shields holding", and then we see people inside shaking and then grinning...)
In "Preemptive Strike", a swarm that features perhaps two of the Starfleet fighters and a number of the larger Bajoran winged fighting craft plus assorted others (including the smaller version of the Maquis Raider) manages to hurt a
Galor.
Three BoPs (of which one might theoretically be bigger than the other two) make shorter work of a
Galor in "Way of the Warrior", though. I can't readily see any party going for attack craft smaller than that if they want to do good damage to starships, even weakling Cardassian ones.
That could mean fighters were introduced specifically to offer a flexible rapid response to the less advanced and smaller vessels Starfleet faces.
Yet Bashir and O'Brien seem to think it literally (literally literally!) suicide to send in the fighters, even exclusively against Cardassian vessels.
Perhaps "attack" in Starfleet instead means the same as in today's Anglophile air forces - ground attack? This is the use the Maquis originally have in mind for the Starfleet "attack" fightercraft in their possession.
Even a moderately well off colony could probably afford a few of them to protect a solar system and drive off just about any pirate ship, which makes sense given the Maquis were able to afford those craft, even if they were courier retrofits, as well as slightly larger ones.
Hard to see these attack fighters as couriers, with their cramped Type 15 shuttlepod cabins and implied lack of endurance. But colonies might well enjoy having craft that can be serviced on the ground and then deployed on various insystem errands, including those calling for rapid deployment at warp. Any good against pirates? Well, certainly if those pirates try and land or beam down in order to pillage! If they only come to bombard (odd behavior for pirates), then their ship probably is too much for the fighters to chew, which might be why we never hear of colonies defending themselves against bombardment or similar attack with fightercraft.
Timo Saloniemi
The Empire logically geared most of the defenses around a capital fleet attack, since they assumed that would be the minimum amount of firepower needed to seriously damage the Death Star. The second Death Star, had it been completed fully, would have eliminated the exhaust vents as a potential weak spot and improved other things.
