A couple of notes, suggestions, etc:
-CIWS will do very little to protect any ship that does not have any other layers of defense invested.
-From a logistical standpoint, I'd suggest running fighter-sized ships (500 tons). Might be tricky with how squadron jumps work, but you can still squadron jump using a ship larger than 500 tons at least.
-Your engine designs seem to be suffering from a strained fuel efficiency ratio. If i may suggest, try to push for at least 40% engine by weight, and it'll be easier to strike a good balance of speed and efficiency with multiplier adjustment beyond that.
-As these ships wouldn't (shouldn't) be firing on missiles, you could probably afford to make the active sensors smaller in exchange for a higher resolution to bring the range back up. Make sure you don't go much over 20 HS resolution if you want to hit smaller ships.
-The maint life is extremely long, assuming you don't have fighter maintenance spaces yet, you can save tonnage by simply removing it outright. In a this situation, with what the current fuel amount is, if the ship's been operating for more than 44 hours, you'd have bigger things to worry about than maintenance failures.
-Do note, that in current mechanics, jump drive capability is limited to the size of the ship that it's strapped to. For instance, that jumpship will only move 1,900 sized ships, at most. If you cannot make the jump engine any smaller, I'd advise padding the tonnage a bit with actual armor, bigger, more efficient engine, logistics (fuel for accompanying task groups, maintenance supplies, cryo bays for rescuing stranded and PoWs), and perhaps shielding since it's considered military anyway..
- The CIWS are only there for giving the small craft a small chance to survive, really only a morale booster if anything
- Yepp smaller is better, but I cant build SBMHAWKs from Star Fire, would be fun... So I went for something that probably could survive a small yield bomb or a small laser and hopefully fire of its missiles.
- About the engine, its an older fighter design, its really only to take the craft through the warp point, nothing els, didn't want to spend research on a new small engine, it does what its supposed to do...
- Yes its a small resolution sensor and I could probably waste a missile or two on that but I don't have any other small sized sensors so I take the chance... With some luck I will hit a fighter if nothing ells, a "bit" of overkill I admit, but better than nothing I suppose.
- Yepp right about maintenance, its now fixed to the smallest available.
- Well yes I have heavy frigates, destroyers and cruisers. My destroyers and cruiser's have standard missile launchers and my HFF has 10 box launchers, but all those ships are supposed to move by themselves to a target area. My WPA ships are to be carried by a carrier and for each HFF I get 3.8 WPA ships and since they are not trained they will fire there weapons in a staggered manner avoiding the the overkill and mostly important(
) my frigates are crewed by 103 men and women compared to 5 or 12 on the WPA ships.