--- Well, for one we already have them in the ship design window. Why are we throwing that out? I can launch GSFs from outside of orbit, so they are space faring ships. When not on Ground Support Missions, they can be fired on by STOs and ships... like ships. They can attack other GSFs when on CAP, like ship to ship combat. They use a form of missile as a weapon, which uses ship mechanics. All this stuff already exists, why are we gutting it? For what? Why not use it instead of throw it away?
This the point I'm trying to get at - just because we already have something doesn't mean we
should keep it. I am asking - if we did not already have GSFs as a space-faring ship type, what reason would we have to make them so. If there is no good reason (and that's an open question), then there is no reason to keep them this way either - if a better alternative exists, which I believe there does.
--- What do we lose? Well for one thing, we can't deploy our GSFs from outside of STO range, so now you have to bring the carrier in range or kill of the STOs before you deploy any GSFs. You cannot have a design for an assault ship that can tank and a design, potentially Commerical, which hangs back and deploys fighters. For another, an FFD is only 60 Tons of Ground Unit. You can quite easily stuff several of those into a fighter's Troop Transport Bays AND fit Fighter Pod Bays. They need to be a ship for all of that to work... or perhaps a better way to say it would be, it needs a bigger re-write to NOT need that to work.
This is a fair point. From a mechanical perspective, I could argue that in this situation the correct way to deploy would be to use a transport bay (normal, or a new 'hangar' type) the same way as one would otherwise use an armored assault drop transport to deliver troops to the ground (and we do need to do this - while GSFs can do missions without ground units to provide FFD, I believe only the direct ground support mission precludes STO fire - someone else can confirm?). Flavor-wise, however, this does seem to be a small loss since the flavor of a carrier-to-ground assault is certainly interesting (otherwise no one would care about GSFs). I don't have a good answer for that right now, admittedly.
However, in an effort to speak positively for my own opinion, I do think there are a lot of flavor gains from converting air units to function as ground units instead of ships. One of my personal big motivations is that right now, we don't have a good unit class to model things like the US Army combat aviation brigades (and similar formations in other armies), or for that matter the entire US Air Force even if one could argue that an air force might be obsolete in the TN Space Era (arguable, IMO!). Particularly for conventional starts this is a piece of flavor I miss and have no good way to model to my satisfaction, since LVH, VEH, etc. are vulnerable to entirely the wrong types of weapons and not vulnerable to the AA weapons a helicopter or air fighter should be. Droll's examples of the scaling problems are also important IMO, a proper air fighter force really should be 100s to 1,000s of planes, not several dozen arranged into a few squadrons.
I do also think this kind of change would be very helpful for NPRs since they can use a new ground unit type much more easily than teaching them how to use fighters. The AA components would then become much more relevant for the player against NPRs, which I think is a huge flavor win as currently AA weapons are just dead weight against NPRs yet any modern army deploys many SAMs, etc.
--- I could say more, but frankly at this point I'm one trying to argue. I feel like no one is listening and I'm getting hot under the collar. Whether no is listening or is has become irrelevant, I need to go chill.
Hopefully now we are all seeing each other's sides more clearly.
