[RogerBW]

There's presumably some foundational work of 1950s-1960s SF that defined the orthodoxy of WWII-like ship classes in space, but I haven't read it. (Certainly Traveller took it on board.) My general feeling is that even if you have crewed combat spacecraft in the first place, justifying space fighters is really hard without the advantage of a different medium to work in.

"So You Want To Build A Spaceship" (Pyramid3-94), which Timothy Ponce and I co-wrote, talks about how to select options in the GURPS Spaceships design system to get a particular feel.