Post-Capella, the TEI has a few very distinct roles for fighters and bombers, in both waves 1 and 2, as well as uses for pre-Capella craft. A quick rundown:
TEI Wave 2:
GTF Atalanta - Space superiority fighter par excellence. Highly maneuverable, excellent gun placement. Mid-level armor and shields.
GTF Nyx - Assault/multirole fighter. Good weapon compatability, high weapon count, decent maneuverability. High shields and weapon energy.
GTF Draco - Interceptor par excellence. Blisteringly fast, ridiculously maneuverable. Tissue paper armor.
TEI Wave 1:
GTF Kulas - Dirt cheap fill-the-ranks fighter.
GTF Aurora - AWACS.
GTB Reia - Good strike bomber.
Pre-Capella craft:
GTF Ares - Archetypical assault fighter. Heavy armor, high shields, impressive secondary capacity, very slow.
GTF Perseus - Space superiority fighter. Almost perfect blend of shields, weapons, and maneuverability.
GTF Myrmidon - Multi-role fighter. Not easily defined, and isn't the best ship for any given role, but can perform quite a lot of roles over the course of a single sortie.
GTF Hercules Mk. II - Assault fighter. Not as powerful or as durable as the Ares, but more maneuverable (and presumably much cheaper).
GTB Ursa - Heavy bomber. Huge payload, sluggish maneuverability.
GTB Artemis - Mid-weight bomber. Decent payload, decent maneuverability (for a bomber).
The GTVA doesn't use many other Terran designs than that, and even then a lot of them don't get used much. The Perseus and Artemis are hands down the most numerous of the pre-Capella craft seen in BP, while designs like the Myrmidon and Herc II don't get used much aside from a few odd mission roles that would suck up more valuable assets. The TEI Wave 1 craft are all designed very specifically to fight Shivans at their own game. Rhea and Kulas are relatively cheap, maneuverable, and numerous for use combating various Shivan hordes, while Auroras provide AWACS support to stack the odds in the GTVA's favor on the field. The TEI Wave 2 designs, however, take the tradition roles of fighters and distill them to their purest essences.
GTVA fighter doctrine tends to fluctuate wildly back and for between maximum performance and minimum cost/difficulty. The current swing is toward maximum performance, after lessons learned fighting the UEF. The GTVA warship doctrine, however, is slightly more static, most likely because of a longer design cycle and slower turnover. Simply put: you lose more fighters than you lose destroyers, so you adapt your fighter designs more quickly than you adapt your destroyer designs to new threats.
Good analysis, though I'm not sure I entirely agree about the way you break down the roles of TEI-1/2 and P-C fighters.
Atalanta -- Excellent space superiority, but also a decent interceptor.
Nyx -- Not just heavy assault, but heavy space superiority, a heavy-fighter/bomber killer, and versatile heavy fighter. It basically takes the Erinyes and gives it the maneuverability of the Perseus and the secondary capacity of a Herc II. The result is an extremely versatile heavy fighter--its only major limitation is speed, but it's pretty decent for a heavy fighter.
Draco -- ??? | The Draco is an oddball. In a sense, it's a Perseus with a better top speed and afterburner duration. The problem is that the Atalanta isn't that much slower, but is more maneuverable, more durable, and packs a bigger punch. For a Wave 2 fighter, its role and capabilities are too much in common with the Atalanta, but the Atalanta can perform intercept duty better than the Draco can perform space superiority duty, at least seemingly. It would help if the two fighters had a high parts commonality--production, maintenance, and logistics are much more streamlined, and it can be more flexibly distributed. Also, note: it can't carry Trebuchets. Considering that the Perseus
can, it really brings up doubts about the Draco's practicality.
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Wave 1:
Kulas -- An odd one, actually. It's not as flexible as the Perseus, and the Perseus is quite maneuverable itself. Still, it might be a dirt-cheap fighter that has a slight edge in the space superiority role, making it useful in the Sol theater. Another possibility is that it's small and more portable (maybe its wings can fold up, like carrier aircraft today?).
Rhea -- A refinement of the Artemis. More 'fighter' and less 'bomber', but still enough 'bomber' to be effective as a strike bomber. The Rhea is actually capable of operating without a fighter escort--just not in the Sol theater, where the UEF's fighters are high-performance, ships have excellent point defenses, and both work in close conjunction.
Aurora -- Arguably the most interesting of the bunch. Its mini-AWACS capability is a huge combined-arms boon, and it's quite flexible. I see it being ideally deployed as one or a few with most squadrons, and when the squadron goes on a sortie, the Aurora goes with them, providing local/dedicated AWACS and EW support, along with its respectable combat capabilities. If you have, say, three in a squadron of 15, then you could deploy one with each four-craft wing.
Pre-Capella:
Myrmidon -- Definitely an oddball. It's highly versatile, but a big chunk of that versatility has very low endurance. Small secondary banks means any multirole niches--subsystem disabling, missile picket, Treb platform--are going to be very short-lived. However, even after that the Myrmidon is a decent compromise between heavy fighter and multirole fighter.
Perseus -- THE multirole fighter. It is more flexible than the Myrmidon in most respects, but maintains that flexibility for longer. A decent interceptor, great dogfighter, decent light-assault fighter, and respectable escort fighter. Because it's cheap, reliable, and easy to maintain, it's widely produced and deployed. This makes strategic-level management easier as well, as you know every destroyer has some Perseus fighters, which are capable of handling a bunch of tasks with flexibility.
Artemis -- Another hard one to call, because it's not clear whether the Artemis usage in WiH is typical or just an oddity of the Sol theater. They almost always pack Maxims in their single quad bank, and almost always head straight for the target, Maxims blazing and Cyclops firing away without any maneuvering. Thus, the only thing making it more worthwhile over the Boanerges in that role is, possibly, speed.
Boanerges -- Cheap, reliable, rugged heavy bomber. As a result, it is widely deployed to deliver lethal payloads onto target warships, either when the target's fighter screen is neutralized, nonexistent in the first place, or mitigated by friendly fighter escort.
Pegasus -- Comparatively cheap stealth recon fighter for special operations and intelligence duty. It has minimal combat viability (at least when not facing small numbers of hostile craft), but it's relatively inexpensive for the other roles it fulfills with excellence.
Erinyes -- An oddball. Against the Shivans, it's an effective heavy fighter with great marks in space superiority--when its meager speed isn't an issue. Against the UEF, it's just not maneuverable enough to work in space superiority unless it's working in direct conjunction with other fighter wings or friendly warships. As it is pretty much never used as such, it's a heavy fighter that tends to get slaughtered by Kents and Uhlans due to its huge disadvantage in maneuverability and total lack of support. I am curious, however, if the Erinyes could be somewhat redesigned to be more maneuverable (and, if possible, faster) at the expense of secondary capacity. This would make it an effective advanced space superiority fighter (or possibly space superiority/heavy fighter) that, hopefully, would be a much cheaper alternative to the Nyx (if only as a stop-gap measure).
Herc II -- The other big generalist, it's different enough from the Perseus to warrant widespread usage. It's got the durability of a heavy fighter, adequate maneuverability against most Shivan fighters (let alone bombers), adequate speed for its role, adequate primary firepower (with some nice flexibility and compatibility, though), and excellent secondary capacity. This fighter should fight with its missiles, not its guns. It can use the awesomely-versatile Trebuchet for interception, convoy escort, turret and subsystem sniping, long-range precision strikes against craft, and light anti-shipping weapon. It can have one bank of those, and another bank of Tornadoes for short/mid-range fighting even against space superiority fighters. 'Skirmisher' only scratches the surface. Importantly, however, they should be (but usually aren't) deployed in smaller numbers to support a wing of different fighters in offensive, defensive, skirmishing, and escort missions. One Herc II, packing Trebuchets, backing up three Kulas' against a wing of Kents? Now we're talking.
Ares -- Heavy Assault, emphasis on 'heavy'. Very durable, and maneuverable enough to take on the heavier Shivan craft. Good primary firepower, unparalleled secondary capacity (slightly higher than the Herc II), and good power generation. Unlike the Herc II, however, this really needs support if it's going directly into the fray. To be honest, the Ares actually makes a great supplamentary anti-shipping weapon: it can pack 24 Trebuchets at once, which certainly does significant damage to even UEF frigates from a safe distance. As an added bonus, those same missiles can simultaneously strike at turrets and subsystems. If given a little fighter escort (like a pair of Persei), a wing of Ares can really hurt the likes of a Karuna.
The way I see it, the Wave 1 fighters are the cheap, cost-efficient additions to the Terran's repertoire that are really needed in a widespread manner (with the Kulas being a possible exception). The Wave 2 fighters are the high-performance (but still grounded in practicality and cost-efficiency), next-gen series that slowly trickles down over time, starting with just elite squadrons, SOC, and certain front-line units. The P-C fighters are the very cheap, rugged, and highly cost-efficient designs that provide the affordable 'bread and butter' fighter and bomber force.
It's interesting to note, however, that there are no bombers (or fighter-bombers) among the Wave 2 craft. This is not surprising, given that the Rhea is pretty much the ideal cost-efficient strike bomber/fighter-bomber, and heavy bombers are increasingly niched items--because the stupid mechanics of torpedoes as they currently are (very slow, long aspect-lock times, ridiculously long fire-wait delays, no dumbfire option, no fittingly large torpedoes that only heavy bombers can carry [as in, carry a couple of, but each one oneshots a Custos]), and that bombers very rarely get any kind of fighter escort.
