Delay order for fighters.

Was just thinking that it would be nice to have a new order for fighter squads which would basically just be a fixed delay time to launch from the start of the battle during which the squad would remain in the hangar. This would allow you to set up waves of fighter attacks.

Just a though. Not sure how much of a pain it would be to implement.

Would be more of a user-interface problem than a coding problem, but could be done. Is this a popular idea?

Maybe an order that only ‘opened the launch tubes’ once a vessel came under attack could be an interesting order?

Making the deployment of staggered fighter waves would be very useful - bring a “light carrier” (cruiser with a fighter capacity of maybe 48) filled with bombers that get held back for a time so that when they finally deploy, they no longer have to worry about shields or heavy armor, as the rest of the battle group has stripped those defenses away.

I also like the tactical decisions - do I hold back my fighters and take the risk that a super-fast and destructive enemy could blow up the carrier before it can deploy the squadrons? (I am assuming that any fighters/gunships on board a carrier go poof if the carrier is destroyed.)

I was envisioning this being used to do things like launch gunships in a second wave to go after destroyers and such after the smaller fighters cleared out enemy fighters in the first wave.

I like to have my fighters out as fast as possible, so I kind of run into a different issue:

I use a spread of cruisers with minimal bays each to dump fighters fast and I’d like my single dreadnaught to be the carrier. Problem with this is that the fighters will go to the launch cruisers to refuel, which I don’t want as it’s too risky to the fighters. I would use launch tubes instead but those are Dreadnaught only. Fighters launched from a single ship take too long…