Cliffski,
I am very interested to know if there is an upper limit to the number of fighters on a single map. So far I have placed over 32,000 fighters on Map 3, 8000 fighters each in four squadrons. I suspect I could get many thousand more than that. Is there a hard limit to the number of ships on one map at a time? Or is there just a hardware limit? My computer, a not too impressive frankenstein with 2gb of ram, loaded 32k fighters in about three minutes. The battle had slowdown, but the thing that seemed to be most affected was mouse scrolling, which was not a big deal if I used the keyboard to move the screen.
By the way, this is what 8000+ fighters escorting a single ship look like. The minimap is also very interesting in this shot.
Completely ignoring the fact the lag factor involved in that many fighter for some people how in the world would you balance them?
If there are that many do they just do 1/100 of a current fighters damage or some super easy way to kill them on bigger ships?
This is mostly just a hypothetical question that stems from me experimenting with the game and being awestruck at the GSB engine that allows thousands of fighters on the screen at the same time. It’s not really practical, I don’t think I would want to increase the number of fighters in a real battle, 16 seems right for a squad (in practical balance and aesthetic senses), but it is really cool when you see 10,000 fighters lock attack foils and charge the enemy. I’m going to try 64k fighters next to see what happens.
Edit
I just answered my own question. The most fighters you can have in the game is somewhere between 33k-40k. This is because GSB can only use 2gb of ram at once, limiting it to using only 2gb of fighter textures and other junk. I am slightly sad that I can’t have 40k fighters, but i am also incredulous at my own sadness, when I started with 128 fighters at most on a map. Cliffski, you have truly created a gratuitous game.
Well if a future mod has such insanely high pilot/cost limits, the simple “balance” against so many fighters would be, a huge blob of anti-fighter fighters or frigates! 
My point is, high limit = no change to balance, since you can place exactly as many counter-ships as you need
There are absolutely no hard coded limits in the game. However, if you want it to run well, avoid fighters with running lights, or turn them off under options. This will make a massive difference to how many can be drawn on-screen in one go.
you could always use editbin.exe or something more user-friendly to make the program large address aware. Then the program would be able to access 4gb of RAM on a 64-bit system (or 3GB on a 32-bit system with the 3GB boot flag set) though there’s no guarentee cliffski hasn’t coded something that will crash and burn in that situation 
textures arent an issue. The only data you need is the per-ship simulation data which is unlikely to be more than maybe 10k per ship at most.
so thats 100 per meg, or 100,000 per gig. Easily a quarter of a million ships 
Good luck getting a decent framerate though
Can someone just make a challenge with this sort of thing as the challenge? ~8 buhmillion fighters to blow up, just to watch Anti-Fighter Frigates shoot them all down. XD
like frymaster said you can make it use more ram there is just some code editing like i have 6 or 8 gigs of rams so if cliff is right o;n 100,000 per gig i could near 1 million fighters