How much armor does it have? When I looked it up on Sarna they only listed the armor for the Lucifer III, which was twenty-one tons of ferry-aluminum.
Eleven tons of standard on the R15, the "Prime"
Lucifer model.
Since I don't know aerotech that well could someone tell a bit about what makes a good ASF? What are a few good models to compare to the lucifer?
Armor is even more important for an ASF than a 'mech, because a hit from a weapon can do a "through armor critical" and damage internal systems if your armor is less than ten times the weapons value (that's total armor, not current). So if you've got 49 points of armor on your nose, a medium laser or LRM cluster can punch through and kill the pilot. With 100 points of armor, only an AC20 can do that with level 1 weaponry.
Consequently probably the most reviled aerospace fighter is the
Chippewa, which has only 7.5 tons of armor leaving it so vulnerable medium lasers can punch through the nose and
small lasers can punch through the wings.
The weapons and speed are much like a 'mech, obviously you want as much speed and firepower as you can get. The
Chippewa also excels at being terrible there, as it has a large number of guns it can't actually use due to not having the heat sinks to fire them all without exploding (it generates 54 freakin' heat on an alpha strike). A single big gun is significantly more desirable than several small ones, the small guns work better for a 'mech but a fighter wants those through-armor criticals so an AC20 or PPC is actually much, much better than you might expect from looking at 'mech combat (not that people like getting hit by an AC20 in a 'mech).
Speed matters of course and ASF lose speed when they add more bombs so ones that are going to be dropping bombs on the enemy, but that just has be balanced with engine size.
In my opinion one of the top fighters of the era here is the
Stingray. It's slightly undersinked but not terribly, it needs a large laser or better to TAC the nose (Wings are vulnerable to medium laser or better), and it packs three big guns in the form of a PPC and two large lasers (along with a pair of medium lasers). It would generate three TACs against the
Lucifer's nose and five against the
Chippewa's on an Alpha strike, though such a strike isn't advised due to heat. It's armor is slightly thin (still a half ton ahead of the Lucifer despite being smaller), it would be better served by dropping the medium lasers for two more tons of armor. Oh, and it's faster than either of them.