One thing I love about this game is learning about other folks' ship build priorities. For example, compared to most of my own missile cruiser or supercruiser-type ships at equivalent tech and totaling an equivalent size, the Boffman has:
* Vastly larger and more fuel-efficient engines; vastly greater range
* Very much smaller magazine capacity; lesser offensive throw weight; roughly equal defensive throw weight
* Somewhat greater defensive capability
* roughly equal space devoted to fire controls and sensors; more fire control and less active sensor redundancy
* Greater deployment time; far greater maintenance life.
So, if I were fielding ships to do what the Boffman does, the biggest change I'd make would be to downsize the engines, without accepting a loss of speed, and therefore accepting a massive loss in range - to be made up for with fleet tankers - and then to devote the saved space to missile storage. For a short-range missile combatant, I would also put a lot more tonnage into launchers. In fact, I'd get twitchy if my design had less than 40% of its hull space devoted to missile launchers and missile magazines, and I've been known to go as high as 60%. As for reloads? For a short-range missile combatant like the Boffman, I'd feel naked without something like 12-15 reloads on the ship itself. For a medium or long-range combatant, my lower limit would be about 8 on-board; fleet ammo ships could carry extra.
Then there are the missiles themselves.
The Boffman mounts very short-range ASMs, coupled with extremely fast-firing ASM launchers, and is therefore intended for fights at what I call "polearm range" - greater than beam weapons; less than medium or long range missiles. I seldom build vessels mounting this class of missiles, because my enemies - who tend to have medium-range missiles - would typically get to fire off their entire offensive armament before I got so much as a shot in edgewise. For most of my playthroughs, the one use case for short-range, rapid-fire ASMs+launchers are in jump gate defence bases, hitting enemies post-jump, but which want to stay out of immediate beam weapon range. The kind of base that "pokes them with a pike before they can swing a sword", if that makes sense.
Let's talk tactical profile.
In Aurora, a space vessel might engage enemies at:
"artillery range" (long-range, two-stage ASMs) (greater than ~100m km),
"bow range" (medium-range, one- or two-stage ASMs) (~5-100m km),
"polearm range" (short-range, single-stage ASMs and AMMs, extremely long-range beam weapons) (~0.8-5m km),
"sword range" (longer-range beam weapons)(~200-800 k km), or
"knifefight range" (carronades, or anything coupled with a short-range fire control) (0 to ~200 k km).
The Boffman is intended for polearm-range combat. Here, it lacks both the launchers and especially the magazine space to be particularly potent for its size and cost. The shields are probably an inefficient use of space and cost at this range, but improve robustness and survivability at all other ranges.
The Boffman is just as vulnerable against artillery-range and bow-range attacks as a beam weapon ship would be. While it does have shields, armor, and AMMs, a 50k ton ship would benefit from better protection. More AMMs in the magazines, and/or perhaps 3-5% of hull space devoted to close in anti-missile defences, or always staying in a well-defended fleet - something along those lines. It entirely lacks long-range sensors, so I presume that it will never attempt lone operations, and will always work with ships having better sensors than itself.
The Boffman is exceedingly vulnerable at sword- and knife-ranges, as it lacks anything like the damage-per second to hold up in a close fight. While its protection is perfectly adequate for its tech level, the lack of damage-dealing ability means death against opponents of equal tech, size, and cost. While it entirely lacks active sensor redundancy against microwaves, the shields ease my mind considerably here.
A contributing problem is that, because this ship is exceedingly large, it takes longer to build, which in turn means greater time elapsed from design to fielding ships with trained crews, which in turn means the empire has to wait longer to field ships that can actually fight effectively at close and medium ranges. This will be less of a problem if this game involves very long travel distances to possible enemies and slow tech development.
Now, one thing the Boffman does have is fairly good speed for its tech level. If the enemy doesn't have spoiler tech or greater, speed is going to be a major force-multiplier for this design, allowing it to dictate the range in in at least some circumstances. If, however, the enemy does have sufficiently high tech - and some do - then the Boffman is going to be too slow. And, for the Boffman, being too slow means death.
