In practice, a craft designed to fight in both Earthlike atmosphere and deep space would most likely be an awkward compromise, good at neither.

More realistic aircraft would look like modern fighter planes, space fighters might resemble the B5 Starfury (the original ones, I mean) or the Gunstar from The Last Starfighter. More likely, space "fighters" would consist of a small fleet of laser-linked semi-autonomous drones.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort