I want to know whether people think ground units are too heavy.
No. I do not think ground units are too heavy.
An infantryman with basic weapons weighs 5 tons!
No; an Infantry soldier with basic weapons requires 5 tons' displacement aboard ship to keep them alive, fed, clean, maintained, and fighting fit. How much they (and their equipment, however much of it you count) mass is irrelevent.
Reduce INF size without reducing other units, and you throw off the balance of forces. Reduce all grouund units proportionally and you throw off command limits. Reduce all ground unit size
and command limits proportionally and you throw of transport limits. Reduce size, command limits, & transport limits and you throw off ship construiton balance. Reduce size, command limits, & transport limits (while keeping troop bay ship components the same dispacement) and now all you've done is made a cosmetic change of the number '5' to '1' or '0.15' or whatever you pick, and just as many people now think the chosen numbers are wrong -- it's simply different people.
You could argue that it doesnt represent just an infantryman and his equipment, but it really feels like it does and it should imo.
I
do argue that it doesn't, that it shouldn't, and that the actual weight of a ground unit's personnel and immediate equipment is irrelevent. What is important is how much stuff is needed to support and maintain that ground unit. There is a reason why military units have bases, and aren't forced to camp in fields under blankets that they carry everywhere with them.
More satisfying for ground units being represented to the last man.
Whether you consider one INF-PW element to be one individual or two, or ten, or a hundred is for you to decide. The beauty of Aurora is that it is flexible enough to include Space Marines (TM GW) and Heinlein's bugs at the same time and with the same mechanics.
You could make armor add weight to balance things out. I dont like how power armor and heavy power armor are just straight upgrades of regular armor
And I absolutely loathe the idea that
this year's Infantry take up 2% more displacement than last years, and I have to redo all my units because now they won't fit in the available transport.
Aurora already assumes that two-foot-tall, thirty-kilo Venusians and twelve-foot-tall, four-hundred kilo Saturnians require the exact same displacement to keep alive and fight with the exact same capabilities. The gound unit numbers were chosen for game balance, not to perfectly fit any particular individual's fiction.