In my recent games, I run into quite a lot of issues later on deploying habitats. Building mass of small habitats gets out of hand quite fast as you start building 4+ 5M capacity habitats per 5 day increment and ground forces takes a long time to start actually working on producing anything on location. It is great stopgap in times when producing larger habitat takes years using only ground forces, but once it gets to year or less, you spend much more time fortifying than producing habitats.
Unfortunately, given how large habitats get, tugging them ceases to be an option at certain point.
OH Eye of Sol 001 (Eye of Sol class Orbital Habitat) 1 250 394 879 tons 75 010 Crew 532 460.5 BP TCS 25 007 898 TH 0 EM 0
1 km/s No Armour Shields 0-0 HTK 65228 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 1 PPV 0
MSP 0 Max Repair 200 MSP
Habitation Capacity 500 000 000
Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 6 months
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
This design is classed as a Space Station for construction purposes
30Mt magnetofusion tug is going 268km/s tugging station of this type. Needless to say it ramps up costs quite a lot, especially as high engine % is needed to move it at all.
(the tug design)
30Mt Backbone class Tug 30 000 000 tons 275 220 Crew 1 895 842.9 BP TCS 600 000 TH 6 880 000 EM 0
11466 km/s Armour 1-8600 Shields 0-0 HTK 57508 Sensors 0/0/0/0 DCR 1 PPV 0
MSP 39 Max Repair 500.0000 MSP
Tractor Beam
Commander Control Rating 1 BRG
Intended Deployment Time: 24 months
Commercial Magnetic Fusion Drive EP2000.00 (3440) Power 6880000.0 Fuel Use 1.33% Signature 2000.00 Explosion 5%
Fuel Capacity 1 656 856 000 Litres Range 749.8 billion km (756 days at full power)
This design is classed as a Commercial Vessel for maintenance purposes
This leaves player with 3 options.
1, Build large habitats at central location and bite the bullet of high fuel bills and high cost infrastructure + long travel time
2, Use ground units, suffer micro of moving hundreds of them and wait years for them to finish fortifying on each world
3, Micro hundreds of habitats being moved yearly
My suggestion would be adding a ship module that adds a factory worth of production to a planet. If price was suitably high, lets say double or tripple the cost of factory for one, it would be mainly useful in later parts of the game when producing larger stations around sol ceases to be viable and mobile production needs to be set up.
My main wish of this type of thing would be reduction in extreme amount of time or micro alternatives take. Price and size could be suitably sarge to discourage use in early game, but option of mobile construction force that's easy to deploy in lategame would be more than enough incentive to use them.