So why risk a single gigantic weapons platform when you can have hundreds of smaller ones that can take your enemy's large pieces off the gameboard just as well and across entire systems (FS2 strike craft were jump capable) where your large base of operations/capital ship is never threathened?
Because your capital ship is always threatened. There's no horizon to hide behind, no terrain to shield you, no air resistance or gravity to limit weapon range. A ship so small as the space shuttle is visible from the asteroid field, eight light-minutes away. Bringing fighters, manned or otherwise, simply wastes delta-v that could be better spent on a missile or kinetic buckshot.
The game is based on WWII dogfighting (as is pretty much every other fighter sim), but if we're talking about
realism, then we have to recognize that space is not an ocean and the obsolescence of naval battleships does not apply.
Either way we're digressing.
I pretty much agree with this. In the future more tasks should be accomplished with less people. FS2 just took WW2 warship crew compliments and used a rough multiplier based on the increased size of the ships. I saw a documentary of how much work it took to load a main gun on an Iowa class (WW2 era) battleship. 10 guys to remove the powder and shell from storage, 10 more guys to take it to the next room 5 loaders 3 gunners a communicator 5 bore cleaners and a commanding officer and more random roles I forgot about... just for one gun. A battery (turret) can easily be crewed by 100 men each doing a small task since almost nothing is automated. Freespace tech should not be so bulky. I mean your fighter weapons are automated right?
On the contrary, to support the dramatic numbers. I get the idea that in the FS verse due to population control issues or the way they conduct warfare that human life is just not as highly regarded as it is now. So that would support the dramatic numbers, because why have machines do it when you have so many damned people on all these planets.
Capella is stated to be a densely-populated system, with a population of... 250 million. Even if overpopulation were a problem in Sol, I don't think that's why the GTVA starts churning out 10,000-man Hecates. The crew count probably comes from the need for all sorts of specialists to not only keep the ship running, but to come up with solutions on-the-fly to unpredictable battle damage that could cause a fully-automated system to spew more errors than FSO does from a malformed .tbl.