I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea that warships like the Texas, McKenna, and Aegis have docking collars despite looking like they're meant solely for ship-to-ship combat. It would make sense to me for heavy combat ships like those to eschew docking collars for other things that enhance their combat effectiveness and leave dropship transport to lesser-armed warships or plain jumpships.
Are these warships actually meant to jump with a dropship complement attached, then once the jump is completed detach the dropships and cruise through space as a flotilla or space superiority task force? That would make the most sense to me if the droppers were assault ships and not meant for ground invasion. But if they're meant for a ground invasion task force, that seems to be asking for the ground unit transports to get blown up before they get planetside unless they're left behind a safe distance. Then they're stuck if their ride gets destroyed while trying to achieve space superiority.
So what's the point of putting docking collars on heavy combat warships?
Imagine your big ships as being something like it's own taskforce. The docking collars in ship-to-ship lets you bring things the designers didn't work in, like carriers or assault dropshps to fill the escort role and provide the popcorn you need to get through an engagement.
"What is popcorn?" you mihgt ask?
Popcorn is assets that act as ablative meat for your expense-heavy and powerful units. because unlike Battlemech combat, space combat is actively lethal and very few space assets survive long against opponents that can actually hurt them.
A fighter deliveing an Alamo will put 98% of your big warships into the 'dead' category, and unlike ground combat, this isn't a WMD situation, it's a 'the only rational move a smaller opponent (which anyone facing the SLDF is, by definition, going to be) can make" situation. Fighter borne and missile borne nukes are inexpensive, Warships are Expensive.
Speaking of expensive, that means needing to get the most use per C-bill, and you know what, in the Battletech universe, is more influential than Naval Forces?
Did you say Ground forces? if you did, you understand. Pure Naval is too narrowly mission specific to afford to maintain when the vast majority of conflicts are resolved by a couple Heavy Equipment Operators duelling on the ground.
Thus, to justify the big warship, it has to be a great big tour bus for the 'mechwarriors if you want to get the expenditures approved by the First Lord and his committee, because what you are NOT going to face, is a peer level Naval Force. Not since the Reunification war. (Please note: Reunification War era designs ran with fewer drop collars, or even none, at least early on, and the poster child of those, is the Aegis, which is a big gun cruiser with two collars total-aka just enough to do underway replenishment or carry a couple carrier dropships.)
The political and strategic environment that designs like McKenna, Texas, Sovetski Soyuz, Luxor and similar ships were designed and approved in, was an era of
Asymmetric warfare, in pragmatic terms, in that era, your big warship's main job, is to be an orbital supply point, hospital, and command post that's too threatening to attack for the kind of people it would most likely face-the real heavy lifting was done by dropship and fighter crews getting the 'mechwarriors to the ground to settle the issue.
The reason it took until after the Clans were in the Kerensky Cluster for the Cameron Class to get their heat management dealt with, is because
they were never supposed to actually need it. A stock Cameron can still settle the issue with 99% of likely opposition in the Star League Era using a handful of secondary weapons...if, and only if, the enemy actually brought enough to get through the escorting dropships and fighter screen.
Most enemies weren't even going to have that much. The Taurians had to sneak nukes into fueling stations and maintenance yards, if they wanted to damage the post-Reunification SLDF. Amaris spent a vast amount of money (Squandered it even) to have a navy a fraction of the size or effectiveness, and the same can be said of the Great Houses, and that's right up into the turn of the 29th century.
Prior to the Amaris Coup, the political/strategic situation was such that "Peer conflict' was, at best, a theoretical exercise, not a practical reality...but landing punitive expeditions and such on rebellions? that was something that was an ongoing activity, right there with dealing with insurgents. Most of those Star League era battlewagons were in a situation where they needed the drop-collars, because they were the expensive, powerful, even terrifying, tour bus for ground forces.
