Basically, though as far as I'm aware the Hermes lacks torpedo tubes as described in the tech manual.
Main problem: making too many things saucer-based gives me hives.
Yeah, but at one point I want to make an alpha strike king real torpedo boat with like 4 photon torpedoes and only a light phasor armament that hangs back and shoots torpedoes at things. The ability to fly in a wide circular arc around the battlespace and shoot torpedoes off it's side axis would be really cool.
Not usually. Tenders usually make more sense given the tech base. There may have been a couple of exceptions, but I might also be remembering fanworks of some sort. Well, as of the end of DS9/Voyager anyway.
In some side material, but never really been a thing in the shows and in quest they aren't considered viable because torpedos make big booms. The Typhon class, for example, or the Peregrin and Valkyrie fighters (unless the game I played made them up).
It depends. Generally speaking carriers as we understand them do not exist, those that do tend to be in spinoff games and there they're generally just ww2 carriers in space. Star Trek: Invasion had one of the few depictions of basically modern fighter combat in space in a video game (as I understand it).
Shuttle-sized fighters are technically a thing that exist around the TNG era, but not in any great numbers so it seems. So probably not in the way you're thinking, where fightercraft would constitute the main 'armament' like on a modern-day carrier - any ship that can carry shuttles can probably service fighters, but not many.
If not shuttle-sized...are ship-sized fighter carriers something we can do? If we don't have to put any nacelles on the successor to the Skate, that'd be seriously good for shaving off volume and mass.
Honestly, I had Battletech in mind with jumpships and magnetic dropcollars and all that. (Which I'm pretty sure wouldn't apply to Star Trek. It'd need to be a ginormous bay of some kind for holding ships.)
Bit pointless when enemy ships respond to you launching by... Warping away. And when it comes to hitting targets that Can't do that you could just put the weapons on the ship with the warp drive for the same effect.
Really we need ONE ship with a very powerful warp core and big nacelles, then have that ship mate with 4-6 nacelleless frigate sized "fighters" who focus on high maneuverability and firepower. The "carrier" wouldn't look anything like a traditional carrier, more a set of nacelles with a tiny ship in the middle of long nacelle legs that have clamps to grab the parasite ships it carries into battlespaces.
The tender would look like a freestanding inline secondary hull. Where the saucer would normally be would just have a frame with connection points to dock 4-6 skate sized nacelle free ships.
Tiny for the size of the nacelles it's strapped to. Basically a frigate sized central hull with dreadnaught sized nacelles hanging off the sides.
The best bet would be to make what's basically a MGB/MTB in space - taken over long distances by tenders/otherwise supported by them, but otherwise highly manoeuvrable & capable of extreme speeds over relatively short distances. Not the largest or most powerful craft, but their size/cost allows them to basically run in swarms towards anyone hostile and drown them and their defences in torpedos.
