Without Collars or Dropshuttle Bays, you will be severely limited in your exploration ability.
What about the Cruiser Warship. 500k Tons, less thrust, more boom boom, same number of Small shuttles, similar Cargo Capacity, but with 2 Dropshuttle Bays capable of carrying 10k ton vessels. The Vincent is a decent military craft, the Cruiser wasn't, though it is more than capable enough for exploration.
The Cruiser class also carries 48 NAC/10, 24 Barracudas and 6 White Sharks, and was originally meant to lob nukes at people. While you'd probably be OK during the Star League era, since it's considered long obsolete then, during the Civil War/Jihad era I'm looking at, that's almost 3.5 times the broadside of a Fox class, and in the ballpark of a Kyushu class frigate.
There's issues with the bays, too, but I'll explain that below. Also, I'd originally planned to use a Vincent because what I'm basing this idea on, the version of Niops from the old FGC'62 game, specifically had two of them they planned to do this with, along with a handful of Trackers for anti-pirate work, and the Naga they were keeping for home defense.
Do you really need a LFB? Your scientists are going to want to spend some time at each planet, more than enough for a sail charge. Do you need a craft that accelerates at 3g max, because you are not going to be outflanking other warships and dropships. The one thing you do want, collars or shuttle bays are something the Vincent lacks.
With the Cruiser, you can have a couple sizable dropships, 10k Tons is rather larger, a couple of modified Overlords. with the Mech Bays torn out, and replaced with Cargo Space, no need to hot drop anything, or secure a landing zone.
You
can't actually carry Overlords, sadly. It was ruled that only DropShuttles
In fact, for the canon ships we know about,
you can only carry the following:
Saturn Patrol Ship (2243)
Vulture (2312) (Cargo - 2420, (Standard - 2405)
Manatee (Cargo - 2403), (Standard - 2449)
Black Eagle (2453)
There's also a
to-be-released version of the DroST I that will be reduced to 5000 tons and able to be carried in a DropShuttle bay.
Unfortunately, we just don't have any other published ships that qualify as being both old enough to be pre-JumpShip docking collar invention in 2460-2470 range, and also smaller than 5000 tons, which is also required by the DropShuttle Bay rules. While that severely limits their utility, you are left with a couple 'Mech haulers, a couple vehicle/infantry haulers, a primitive assault ship, and some cargo hauler variants, but they're all older than dirt, just like the Cruiser itself, and they almost all have crappy/extinct availability in the 3060s. Only the Vulture is still around, and any of those you want to use, you'd need to rip the KF Boom back off the ship, since they've undoubtedly been converted to work with JumpShips since then, which precludes working in DropShuttle Bays.
You will greatly increase the ability to stay in the field and do science, if you can make fuel and water on the worlds you visit, or can find an icy ball floating around somewhere, don't think you want to dock you warship with the refining equipment to a comet for fuel and water. Instead of using 1/2 you cargo space for fuel and water, you can carry other things, like more food, or the hydroponics bays, satellites or workshops mentioned above, as well as dropping HPG satellite bread crumbs on the route.
That is indeed one of the Vincent's limitations, in that we don't have a canon version of the Vincent with any capacity to carry DropShips at all, which is a little frustrating, and makes its adoption for this purpose harder to do. And, yeah, small craft for refueling will take a huge amount of time to do.
Most of the exploration will be done with the Dropships and their assets, not the warship. I would see vehicles and industrial mechs being far more important for exploration. I would see keeping some measure of Drone Command equipment handy as well. Like mention above, something like a high scout, or dedicated space on the Dropships, for small unmanned aircraft and hovercraft, maybe even submarines, if you find an ocean world. I would also think you would want everything Fusion powered, or at the very least Hydrogen Fuel cell powered.
Yep. Hydrocarbons would suck to maintain on your ground vehicles.
