There should be some way to set ships to ignore and never engage with fighters. I find it frustrating to have a group of cruiser that spend their time shooting aimlessly at fighters, even when the fighter orders are set to minimum, and just get picked off by capital ships. I’ve had some sit for like 5 minutes doing this when they easily would have mopped the floor with the remaining captial ships but I ended up loosing.
James R. Coplin
This has been suggested in numerous ways in numerous threads. Please read through a few pages of the forum before making new threads. It keeps everything neat and tidy. 
I thought this was accomplished by deleting the “attack fighters order?”
No, when there is nothing else to fire at all weapons will stil be fired at fighters, which means that the weapons are reloading when the actual enemy ships get within range.
Yes, I was surprised that ships still attacked fighters even after deleting “attack fighters” order. and than wasting missiles to uselessly attack them instead of actual designated targets.