I'll keep this brief as I'm going to hit the hay, as it were, but I've noticed that Flak frigates and their alien counterparts are extremely effective at eating up fighters.
This is especially interesting, since everything that can carry a wing of strikecraft (and can move) is a hell of a lot more expensive, fragile, or higher on the tech tree than AAA.
I generally have a fleet that carries a group of strikecraft - a Supercarrier supported by two or three cruiser-class carriers and a couple of flak frigates for their own well-being - they generally hang out on the edges and send in their own wings of whatever I need. I have most certainly noticed that if there is just one or two flak frigates, they simply stand no chance at all and will take EXTREMELY heavy losses. Even without being in fire, replacement of squadron damages is ponderously slow, and replacing damage to the entire WING is extremely time-consuming. I've really just taken to grounding all my squadrons until all anti-air defense has been cleared.
Sure, that parallels reality to a degree, but in reality, it also takes one laser-guided or anti-radiation munition to blow the top off an SA-25. You don't send F-15s into a battlefield plagued with AAA, but they have certainly been designed to detect and jam radar sites and anti-air weaponry as well.
I'm fine with flaks being effective against strikecraft, but I'm not fine with the fact that, at least on the TEC side of things, they can not only take a ridiculous amount of punishment and refuse to go down even under withering firepower, and even a wing's worth of bombers is unable to put a dent in them, but that they're a tech tier lower, significantly cheaper, and can so effectively lock down my strikecraft, removing them from play. A whole fighter group can be neutralized by a cheaper investment of flaks.
As it is, it's meticulously time-consuming to hunt down and slowly whittle away each flak frigate first before I can launch any strikecraft - even if I designate them to LRM launchers, they still wander into range of a flak and they're suddenly half-dead.
Thoughts?