I just reread this before sending and it sounds a little like I am being critical. Its not intended that way but I need to try and get my concerns across so please don't take offence at anything here. It may be I have just misunderstood.
Not a problem - no offence. I (think I) understand your concerns.
The problem is that you are introducing a completely new concept that has a lot of knock on implications. For example, why can't I have a ship that only uses the half size lasers and reactors but full size everything else? Presumably that would give me a lot more firepower for minimal basing requirements.
Because a few days out from base on the deployment, the lasers and reactors would be broken with no way to fix them. The idea is that the tonnage associated with a particular weapons system on a blue-water combatant is a lot more than just the actual weapon - it's all the infrastructure (and people) to fix the thing when it breaks down 10 days out. Consider a Sparrow launcher: when it's part of a point-defense installation on a ship, if it breaks the person who fixes it is part of the crew, with tools that are stored on-board. When it's a launch rail on a fighter, the person who fixes it lives at the airbase and uses tools from a shed on-base. This was the idea about having a rapid maintenance clock - there's a short-time maintenance cycle that is going on all the time that's completely abstracted away in Aurora. If the clock were set up to run 10x or 100x as fast as normal from the point of view of breakage (but not spare consumption) that would prevent the sort of laser scenario you're worried about.
The question I have to ask for plausibility purposes is how? Some things like engineering could presumably be offloaded in return for a high failure rate but a half size magazine isn't going to hold as much as a full size one and I am not sure that having half size but fully capable shields, lasers or sensors because some of their normal shipboard functionality would be on board a different ship would be realistic. For systems like fire control or missile launchers there are already rules for making them larger or smaller so any new rule would be in contradiction to that rule.
The systems I was mainly concerned about were big hunks of metal, like power plant, laser/torpedo/etc. mounts, engines, etc. I was about to say "the smaller missile launchers fit in with this idea" but after some thought decided that from a consistency point of view the GB idea would still apply (although maybe with less of a size reduction) - there's got to be tonnage on a warship associated with maintaining the missile launchers etc., as opposed to the tonnage of the launchers themselves.
Note that the GB size "reduction" (actually a tonnage division into two parts) would be on top of any other size reduction/growth mechanisms.
I'm pretty flexible on the point of missiles, however - if you thought it didn't make sense or put in too much imbalance I could live with systems like missiles, magazine, fire control, sensors, etc not having GB variants and requiring full-size installations.
You could even have a line of "GB size reduction" tech e.g. 15%, 30%, 40%, 50% offload so that the advantages of having GB wouldn't all accrue from day 1.
Unfortunately this would also lead to requests for normal ship-systems to shrink over time. If you can make gunboat systems smaller over time through technology, why can't you make ship systems smaller over time through technology?
Aaaah - but you're not shrinking the systems; you're just getting more efficient at off-loading the relevant bits. The total (GB+Base) tonnage, crew, and cost of the system stays the same (and might even go up if you've got a penalty for offloaded bits). I'm not married to this part of the idea, I just thought it might be helpful from a gameplay point of view.
If we didn't have the "GB offload ratio" tech (a much less loaded name than "size reduction"), then that also allows changing the size ratio to shift GB balance, i.e. if 50% is too drastic then you might use 25%
I am concerned that this would create half size ships with full-size capabilities with a hand-wavium that there is a tender involved. Using these rules we would see a lot of 10,000 ton gunboats that would be superior to 'normal' ships and in fact become the standard. I understand the idea but I am concerned it isn't realsitic within the game mechanics. I am happy to try and create realistic smaller ships but they will have to abide by the same game principles as larger ships. It's back to the super-fighter-lasers of Starfire.
When something is made smaller, there has to be some significant penalty to the actual system. The new smaller missile launchers are very slow firing and the new 'gunboat' engine discussed earlier in this thread has a restriction of one per ship plus massive fuel use and high explosion probability. Smaller items have to be useful for a particular situation and not generally useful in all situations
Would the gunboat concept I have laid out in this thread not meet your requrements for a small, fast attack craft anyway? I am looking at ways to hold them on board motherships at the moment.
Like I said, I think I understand where you're coming from. I think the part you might be underestimating (or I may be overestimating :-) ).
Like I said - you're the one who's writing the game; all I'm doing is advocating.
Thanks Steve,
John