I suppose my claim would be more credible if I actually explained how I did it. Then others could reproduce it. I just figured if anyone cared, they would ask.
first see this link on how to get the steltek fighter:
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... php?t=6464
The steltek fighters takes longer because you have to aquire them one at a time instead of simply buying them at the commodity exchange. You have to launch with the paradigm, eject a ship, switch to it with '[', dock in the paradigm, trade it for the steltek fighter, launch as the fighter, switch back to the paradigm and tractor it in. Once the fighter is in the cargo hold you can buy it at the paradigm's ship dealer. Continue ejecting ships, docking, buying stelteks, launching, and tracktoring. It takes a while.
In either case you want your paradigm to be full of whatever ship you want. You also need a paradigm in the cargo hold. How can you do this? When the paradigm becomes available buy it first at the ship dealer, then go to the commodity exchange and buy it there.
Ok so now you have your paradigm with a paradigm inside and a bunch of fighters. Here's where it gets tricky. First, sell the paradigm from your cargo hold. Go to the ship dealer and buy it there. You will be able to do this because the one you have is not in your fleet. Now you have one to pilot and one in reserve in your fleet. Every paradigm will be a copy of the one in your fleet. In other words, the paradigm you just bought will be full of fighters.
No go to the commodity exchange and buy back the paradigm, you might need to sell off some random cargo. You should now have 3 paradigms. One active with one in it's cargo hold, and one sitting in "my fleet".
Now you launch. Eject a fighter, switch to it, land, and pay to transport your paradigm in 'my fleet' to the paradigm you landed on. Then buy another paradigm from the ship dealer. This way you always keep one in your fleet for the others to copy. Launch with that paradigm, eject a fighter and repeat. Once you have 5 or so paradigms flying around. Dump all their fighters. It takes a while to skip through all the ships you dump and it gets laggy if too many are on the screen, but it just looks cool.
If you had enough money, and patience, you could in theory do this forever and create a virtually unlimited fleet of ships. The only problem is that you can't keep them all because you can only land one of your many paradigms. Plus it is quite expensive to buy say 20 paradigms, but you can rack that kind of cash up pretty easily doing cargo missions with the paradigm.
I hope all of that made sense. I probably should have put that in the original post.