The Strategic advantages of PWSs

[Korzon77]

Pocket Warships are inferior to true warships in nearly every respect--but they can be completely superior in one. 

Strategic mobility.  A warship is restricted to one, or at most two, jumps followed by a long-term recharging cycle. 

Pocket warships are only restricted by the number of jump ships you can assign to them. It would be hard, and ruinously expensive, but with enough jump ships you could move a pocket warship force from Terra to the Periphery in  a matter of days or a fwe weeks, dependent on how quickly you could switch out jumpships.

Which makes me wonder-- perhaps that's another reason why many states went to a pocket warship based fleet? I mean, unless you have a fairly small state, it's not enough to have one BB-- you have to have several, especially accounting for downtime and the need to cover certain nodal points. 

[marauder648]

The problem with that is that it then ties up a lot of Jumpships into the Command Circuit needed to run this, and that reduces your capacity in other areas.  Sure it could work, but if threatened from other flanks, would you want to risk it?

[Maingunnery]

A good excuse to build a lot of Monoliths.

[Alsadius]

The appeal to me seemed to reside more in the fact that they can be manufactured in bulk, whereas K-F drives are extremely rare in the era, and that they can be divided up to cover a multitude of systems with something, instead of putting all your eggs in one basket.

[idea weenie]

Pocket Warships require Dropship construction capability (which most Successor States have), vs Warships needing Compact Core and the giant-sized engines technology.

The former is relatively common (plus the maintenance personnel are far more available), while the latter's engines needed help from Comstar when the Clans invaded.

Essentially a 3-part chicken and egg situation.  There are not a lot of Warships because repair facilities and personnel are not that common.  Why are the personnel not that common?  Because there is little market for their skills.  Why is there little market for their skills?  Because there aren't a lot of Warships.

Someone is going to have to make the first (expensive) step to get the cycle flowing.  An easy one would be a Cray style superfreighter that simply travels back and forth between two locations (likely a mining location near an industrial site).  The Industrial site checks over the freighter before every jump, so it doesn't have a problem jumping back.  Good calculations mean it could perform pirate point jumps each time, so instead of a ~10 day transit from jump point to planet, it is only ~8 hours transit before loading/unloading operations are performed.

[Giovanni Blasini]

Pocket WarShips can also be built on a planet, and don't require orbital infrastructure the same way WarShips do.

[Tai Dai Cultist]

The various regimes of Powers That Be have never given an accounting for the impact on the BTU from leaving the baseline 3025 setting.  Come the 33rd century they can build mechs better than the SLDF ever had during the glory days of the Star League,  but we don't know if water filters need to be acquired by raiding the next world over for theirs.  To the point relevant to this thread:  we don't know if JumpShips are anywhere near as rare and irreplaceable as they were in 3025, or if they're now being banged out at the speed of plot in the same way Mechs were.

IF conventional JumpShips have seen an explosion in production the way 'Mechs have, PWSs may indeed be the superior long term investment from an infrastructure standpoint.  But IMO they wouldn't be superior by much.  There are two things that have unchallenged tactical supremacy in naval combat:  A swarm of ASFs for the bulk of the battles where no Lev IIIs are present, and Lev IIIs the rest of the time :}