Replacing Fighters on the Fly

[Ebreus]

Problem Description

There's a major logistical impediment to the use of fighters, replacing them after inevitable losses. Fighters are expendable, I don't think there's really a way around that and keeping them being somewhat balance. But fighters are treated like Nukes, there's no re-loadable deployer or "fighter racks" to store more in. So they're treated like nukes: largely ignored.

Related Issue Links

#3921
This kind-of addresses the same issue, reducing the tedium of replacing everything, but has several drawbacks including effective homogenization of significant regions of space in terms of outfitting and subsequent reduction in the charm of the game overall.

#906
This also addresses the temporary nature of fighters, in reducing it and therefore need to replace them, but also introduces unintended ease of looting large numbers of fighters and biasing costs in favor of carriers. My solution maintains the cost of carriers but just reduces the tedium.

#8989 & #3920
These both address the issue by trying to make fighters unkillable... which has several issues including giving the player a mechenical edge in a way that the game just doesn't do (as mentioned by Saugia). I think NPCs could use my solution though it may require additional tweaks to do so.

#8128
Also addressing the issue of replacability but it would hit either far end of not-good in terms of a solution here, either it can replicate your lost fighter with all the fittings in which case it'd be quite possibly unbalanced in terms of being quite powerful or it gives you a blank hull or partial fitting which doesn't solve the tedium problem of having a lot of time and effort go up in smoke without easy replacement.
Also what insurance company in their right mind would allow a policy to be open on the most quintessentially expendable spacecraft?

Desired Solution

I'd like an outfit to allow storage of fighters, literally loading them into cargo for recall next time the fleet lands.
I was talking with Zoura in the Discord and she's also tried to resolve this issue, according to her we need the following for this to be doable:

1. Ability to give outfits according to a condition
2. Ability to apply things to ships other than the flagship
3. A method of create-store-recall of a ship's data via datafiles.

1 & 2 are semi-doable currently but 3 is the sticking point that makes this undoable even in plugins.

Alternative Approaches

• Ability for player-owned ships to depart from the fleet to fetch replacements from a stockpile
• Add a high likelihood floatsam to all fighters; Fighter wreck. And the ability for any shipyard to reconstitute the wreck into the lost fighter

Additional Context

Having the issues enumerated in desired solution added would be exceptional even if not used in vanilla as it would open the opportunity for plugins to provide this functionality.