I am curious about the starting conditions. Because in a conventional start, even if I set the shipyard growing after it is done making survey ships, it isn't likely to get to 18,000 ton capacity before Ion tech.
Ah, it's an SM'd start, hence the rather large shipyards. The other faction will be getting some SM touches as well.
I think you should compare your deployment times to your maintenance life. Your maintenance life is way too high. I usually aim for a match between my maintenance life and deployment time with at least twice as much msp as my max repair value.
The maintenance life was addressed by Shoe earlier, but I'll expound on it a bit here. I have that long Maint Life as a side affect, not as a primary goal. The primary goal was to lower the AFR down to something a bit more manageable. With all the Engineering spaces on the Kirov, it currently has an AFR of 152%. These are slow ships, and as such take quite some time outside of port even for something as simple as transferring bases. Over the course of three years out of port it's likely to suffer three breakdowns. If those breakdowns are it's most expensive item, that's half the MSP on the ship gone. That %chance goes up by a lot by dropping even one for only 1HS of savings. That's ignoring that by the time the third year comes around that % goes a lot higher. These are big ships, and according to aurora's rules, they break down fast. With that in mind I decided to play it safe with the maintenance for the first generation.
The craft are slow and rely on lasers.
This has been noted. In fact the entire doctrine hinges upon having superior speed. So while this is a valid point it does make it seem like you haven't read the original post and just looked at the designs.
They are unlikely to catch their targets.
See above.
Your ships seem to be designed to function as part of a fleet but they move at different speeds.
"What are you talking about the ships all have the same sp-..... Huh... when did that happen?" This has been fixed ^.^ Thank you and good catch!
Your armor is fairly weak for ships that will have to close with enemy to kill them.
I will definitely take a look at that. I suspect that having faster ships would do much better and that we just have differing opinions on design here though. Feel free to explain this more though. I'm certainly not against hearing it out.
While I like early fighters, until you get Box launchers they are not really effective as strike fighters. If you really want to not rely on missiles, you should have a fleet that is very strong at point defense. Fighter fire control can hit missiles that have significantly higher engine tech.
The theory is then if you can shoot down all the missiles, which you might be able to before box launcher or x.33 or x.25 launcher size tech, and your beam weapons outrange the enemy, it doesn't matter so much if the enemy is faster, because you just head to the objective and force them into combat to defend it.
It works better on defense than offense, as it is easier to exhaust the missiles of a mobile force. And you would need to be able to track and pursue the empty missile boats of the enemy to do more than fend off the enemy. But if your naval builders had a very defensive mindset, and didn't wish to build an efficient offensive force for fear of seeming threatening and aggressive, it could work, RP wise.
That's actually a pretty interesting concept. Not quite what I was going for, but may just end up being that way in execution. Could you go a bit more in-depth on Fighter fire controls hitting missiles with significantly higher engine tech? It sounds like something I should at least look into.