Why do people always assume there will be loads of pirate fighters? Where would they launch from? How would they get military grade technology to threaten, say, a simple fighter escort wing?
And on other things, how do we know it's all that quicker to make a cruiser? Are there still orbital shipyards, or will they not surely now all be setup for the supercedent Deimos (etc) class? Also, to refer to an earlier comment, why are we comparing cruisers-to-corvette costs on a 1-to-1 basis?
I'm not. Dunno about everyone else. Basically, my answer invalidates the remainder of the questions. In the first paragraph. The GTVA's military, since its inception, has been designed for the purpose of combating the Shivans. There is no reason whatsoever to assume they're going to change that focus now.
Pure size dictates that it must be faster to build an Aeolus then a Deimos. An Aeolus consumes slightly less then half the space of a Demios. Less ship means less to assemble. Indeed, if you're trying to argue that the shipyards are all set up for the Deimos, well, that's actually a plus. You could fit a pair of Aeolus hulls into a slipway of Deimos dimensions. Shipyards aren't like assembly lines that need to be retooled. The basic limit on what a shipyard could build is the size of its slipways. Anything that can fit on the slipway can be built; you could build different ships back to back on the same slipway without a noticible loss of time.
The 1-to-1 cost comparison is perhaps silly, but the 1-to-1 time-to-service comparison I've made is not.
