This still looks like quite a good ship if you ask me.

Here's the thing though, can't squadrons already fly through jump nodes by themselves?

Only with intersystem jump engines (like the ships at the end of FS1).

Most Terran and Vasudan ships do not have these as they apparently are very expensive. Pretty much all Shivan classes seem able to use jump nodes though.

karajorma wrote:Only with intersystem jump engines (like the ships at the end of FS1).

Admiral Shima said that they were being fitted on all fighters, I'm pretty sure... But she was probably wrong since evidently they weren't fitted on all fighters.

Reaching the Zenith Briefing actually hadn't wrote:This mission will be facilitated by the new subspace drive we have received. For years the GTA has tried to give a fighter the ability to do intersystem jumps. After monitoring the Beta Aquilae engagements, the GTA science colony at Sol has finally been able to solve the puzzle. All GTA fighters are currently being equipped with intersystem subspace drives.

Until the Great War, only larger ships could generate sufficient power to use jump nodes. The development of jump drives for fighters and bombers in 2335 enabled the Alliance to destroy the SD Lucifer in subspace. Producing these small jump drives is prohibitively expensive, so they are restricted to missions that require pilots to travel between systems.

Looks like they stopped the second the Lucifer was dead.

Where did you pull that information out of? Especially the 'expensive' part. It's been too long...

I believe it's in one of the FS2 tech room entries, most likely the one about subspace. And I feel like the two statements aren't necessarily contradictory; it could be that Shima was telling the truth when she said that the jump drives were being outfitted fleet-wide. It's one thing to be concerned about military expenditures when you're in a reconstruction mode and only fighting a few systems' worth of rebels; it's quite another when you're staring down the annihilation of your entire species.

It's in species.tbl which you'll see in the techroom entry for subspace.

Top Gun pretty much sums up my take on it but I'll further add that the loss of contact with Earth was probably also a factor. Remember that Sol had the bulk of the Terran infrastructure and was probably also the economic powerhouse of the GTVA too.

Maybe if the Lucifer had been destroyed without cutting off Earth they might have continued sticking them on fighters. Without Sol they definitely couldn't afford it now that the Shivans weren't such a danger.

Uhh the bit I pulled out was from FS1 briefing of the mission "Reaching the Zenith"