I was more thinking of them for things like shipping fighters around, which having normal maintenance failures wouldn't help with.
Best of-course if you can use it for all roles. So maybe the right way to go about it is to start of with thinking what we can imagine being able to use it for?
I can think of a few ideas (some which have been mentioned, others more wild ):
- Transporting Fighters/FACs to their forward base/Carrier
- Transporting larger (fuelhungry and/or low range) bigger ships to their forward base
- Repairing Military vehicles away from home
- Use as a tug? ( dock ships without engines and haul them around )
- Dismantling or repairing wrecks?! ( if we can put our own military ships inside a mobile hangar for repairs why not also wrecks? )
- Hauling Cargo?! What is conceptually the difference between a freighter and a large hangar?
- Transport ground troops with heavy equipment?!
The more I think about these questions, the more I think it might be a good idea for a unified system for transporting all "bulk freight". Hangars, Cargo Holds and Troop Transports could have overlapping abilities, splitting transporting of everything into men and bulk. Transporting a Ship of 4000 ton and it's 400 man crew requires both a 4000t hangar and 400 Spare Berths, Transporting say a Heavy Ground Unit might be possible with for example a 1000t hangar for it's equipment and 1000 Spare Berths for the men... and so on...
In a pinch you could load up some ground forces inside bigger Capital ships ( overloading their crew capacity a bit ), and you could build combined freighters/troop transports able to fill dual roles.
But sorry, now I've gone way Off-topic again