I have been considering some form of 'armoury' module to allow the crew to be better armed for a while. It is less micromanagement than building ground forces to assign to ships where the intention is solely to improve boarding defence. The armoury could be a fixed size and would arm a fixed number of crew with personal weapons with the rest of the crew functioning as they do now. There are a few caveats however.
1) It is unlikely that crew would be as well trained as the troops in a regular infantry formation
2) It is unlikely than crew would be able to function in powered armour
3) It would unreasonable for an armoury module to auto-upgrade crew weapons when that doesn't apply to normal infantry formations.
4) What happens to the ability of the armoury to equip crew after they have been in a battle and some have been killed.
1) and 2) could be handled in 2 ways. Either assign some form of attack penalty, which reduces the effect of having the armoury, or handwave it and assume the 'armoury' module is also used to train the crew.
3) is trickier. The only real way around it is make the armoury a designed module that has fixed weapon and armour strengths at the time of creation. if I did that, I could also have a 'training' option on the module that makes it larger but allows the crew to function at full effectiveness. Plus maybe a 'powered armour' option that also increases size but allows crew to use powered armour. Although that is starting to get more complex.
4) is also tricky. In normal ground combat, when someone is killed their equipment is also lost so the armoury should be less effective after a battle, but I don't want to track weapons held by individual armouries.
The various questions above are why I haven't yet moved forward with this type of module. Perhaps a better option is to give ships an assigned group formation type in the same way as ordnance (which would have to fit within their troop transport capacity), so when they are built they pick up their ground formation. That, together with queueing ground units, solves a lot of the micromanagement. I can even have a name template for the formation so it gets renamed when assigned to the ship.
I quite like the Armory solution to ship security and would highly discourage making the player use regular ground formations for the purpose, which I feel would still be far too much micro whichever way you slice it.
1) I actually had an old co-worker who was a Sonar operator on a USN sub, and he said he received periodic weapons and tactics training. I believe it is standard practice on most ships to 'draft' and equip the crew to repel boarders although specialized security personnel do exist. I'd say it justified to assume crewmen are still trained in anti-boarding tactics as part of their standard curriculum. They're by no means SEALs, but they get the job done. Perhaps if you add a training level attribute to ground units one day armed crewmen could be stuck at 'basic'.
2) I completely agree, Power Armor should be specialized equipment that is by no means standard issue. They shouldn't be issued on ship Armories meant for defense. If you want PA'd troops, you need to do it the old fashioned way with a troop transport bay.
3) I think that 'upgrading' ground troops should be as simple as retraining them when you have better racial armor and weapons at a Ground Force facility; the current system is too convoluted IMO. Same for Armory Modules, they should be upgraded after a ship finishes overhaul or even just when a ship resupplies at a friendly port. After all, you're just clearing out the old guns and brining in the new.
However, when constrained to current systems I think its fine to just make Armories components with a Weapons tech slot and Armor tech slot. Sure its annoying and unrealistic that you have to create a whole new class of ship just to restock the Armory, but its the most straight-forward and easy to understand solution. Perhaps you could make armory 'retrofits' extremely cheap and almost instant.
4) Perhaps link Armory usage to MSP. Whenever you take casualties during a boarding operation, it drains MSP and your armor has to consume more to re-arm. Given how abstract MSP is currently I don't see the harm in extending it to security equipment.
An Armor would be a much more elegant and realistic solution to improving ship security than adding ground forces to every ship.