I have wanted the ability to mothball my ships forever. Ideally mothballing should be done in space, remove all the crew, fuel and munitions and let it sit there, in complete vacuum there should be 0 maintenance needed. Things wont corrode without atmosphere, and things wont break down if they arent being used and thus no maintenance is needed.
Yes, more or less this... there are allot of radiation is space but not damaging enough to a starship in the time frame you would mothball them in a game, perhaps a few decades at most. Space function very well as an environment to mothball ships or you could just dig a big hole in an asteroid and place them there.
I would love for sensors to not be linear when that was brought up with the DSTS stations, I always restrict myself heavily on large sensor systems for that reason alone. I don't think they necessarily need to scale realistically, just not completely linear.
As long as there is a maintenance cost with hangars I'm happy. If Steve want to introduce a mothballing mechanic I don't think hangars is needed for that at all. You should just be able to mothball ships and have them re-crewed at a later stage with basic training. Now you need to retrain the ships. This would be enough of a deterrence for doing it too often. The ships should perhaps also automatically be at around 25% of its maintenance cycle when you reactivate them, so you need to perform a maintenance overhaul or risk them breaking apart when used. A simple tickbox for mothballing would suffice.
If you are a min/max player there are many mechanically abusive way to play the game. In single play you can do whatever floats your boat. If playing the mechanics is fun no one is there to stop you as is no one stopping you role playing. Aurora is more about building your own story line and imaginative world anyway.
I think that some player want certain aspect changed not because they are restrictive but because they help give more options. Sure... anyone can role-play that refueling takes time and set aside space for small cargo holds and cargo transferring equipment in their military refueling ships and then have the ship take some time to refuel. The problem is that it is too micro and takes too much effort to do this when the game cold do it automatically for you. The same goes for maintenance on ships in hangars. This is not a problem in short games but rather irritating in long games where resource imbalance become a thing.
The game has continually evolved making the logistical side of it more and more involved and realistic, I think this is just good. There are almost always ways to work around any perceived micro managing tasks it brings with it. Such as ships with millenia worth of crew and maintenance facilities or engines with more or less no fuel costs. But at least they have ship design drawbacks you need to deal with. We should not just have to imagine everything, drawn to its extreme we might as well imagine playing as well...