I could be mistaken but I believe he mentioned in another thread that the love of 7/11 was to outrun the typical "Medium/Heavy 6/9 Fighter", force SI damage on anything 7/11 - 11/17 speed, and, having the Armor & Long Range guns to handle something like a Trident chasing it.
Right.
So as I understand it, you are using a custom 200 ton small craft, and cramming the quarters in that, so while you are paying for all the small craft stuff, if the dropship doesnt need expanded crew services its not coming out of the dropships tonnage. Versus taking 1 small craft bay, and putting 40 quarters into that, you instead have a small craft with 30 quarters, that only loads into the dropship when extra rooms are needed.
For example, yes.
Even on the 2k cargo version, you dont have the spare bay to actually house the ASF crew, or launch either fighter, with the single 200t remaining small craft bay.
That's not quite right.
The capabilities of a bay with cargo are the standard ones, except you cannot do maintenance, customization, or dropping troops. Dropping troops is irrelevant for small craft bays. Customization is unimportant. Maintenance could be important depending on scenario. This is why there are _2_ ASF for the blockade runner. If you really need to do maintenance mid flight, you can launch one ASF and do maintenance on the other. Obviously, the main transit drive would need to be shut down, so this isn't great. Also obviously, if you knew that you were on a mission requiring intermediate maintenance, (i.e. running a gauntlet), you would just carry somewhat less cargo so you could conduct maintenance under thrust.
Minor side note: for the blockade runner, you would probably use 2 separate bays with 100 tons of cargo and a 100 ton ASF ready to go so that both could launch on demand.
It's also important to notice that small craft bays come with minimal life support and bunks for 5. This is true even when the small craft bay is carrying 200 tons of cargo. Thus, the blockade runner could carry 6 pilots and 42 tech/astechs to keep it's ASF running round the clock with 8 hour shifts, if desired. That's far better than is typical on carriers.
I think your margins on cargo versus used bays are far too tight, you dont have a free open bay to transfer ASF packed up as cargo into to work on.
I was imagining the ASF get into about 1 fight during the blockade running. If you are concerned about more than that, transporting 5% less cargo seems entirely reasonable.
Also, is there a reason to move 7/11?
As Hellraiser says, 7/11 is good at breaking ASF. The heavies can't catch up, the mediums take structural damage, leaving only the light ASF with negligible armor to be worried about. "Brave Sir Robin" is absolutely a key strategy for survivability for a dropship vs. ASF.
More generally though, missions are about capabilities at a price. So, instead of worrying about to much speed, it makes more sense to worry about to much price or not enough capacity. The price is actually fairly low for a military transport. For a Leopard CV price tag, we're getting a Union CV (or more) of transport and armor at Avenger speed. And on the capacity side, it's obviously easy to increase capacity significantly by simply increasing tonnage.
W.r.t. Aerodyne vs. Spheroid, yeah there's a tradeoff here. Going with Aerodyne makes atmospheric operations work better but costs 25% more, a smallcraft bay, and greatly reduces landing options. You could go either way---I decided to go this way here.
On the Omni direction, it may be worth listing things out a bit. Smallcraft bays can handle:
- Cargo. Overhead is 6k/ton.
- ASF. 25% fewer bays but carries 50% more ASF.
- LAMs. 25% fewer bays but carries 50% more than battlemech bays at 4+ per bay.
- Fixed Wing. No overhead, and now you can pack many small ones.
- Quarters. ~25% tonnage overhead and x6 cost overhead.
- Infantry bays: ~25% tonnage overhead but 1/3 price.
- Vehicle bays: ~25% tonnage overhead and x2 cost overhead.
- Battlemech bay: ~25% tonnage overhead and x6 cost overhead.
For a dedicated ground-unit dropship the overhead looks unappealing but not completely crazy. But from an ASF carrier viewpoint, the ability to expand missions to support small craft, fixed wing drones, LAMs, cargo, and troop transport missions while actually carrying more ASF seems pretty appealing.