Cruiser: DropShuttle Bay is exactly what Dragon Cat said, its what ships were using prior to Drop Ship collars. I have problem with it, since there was no need for them to be on Cruiser.
I interpreted "cruiser" in ye olden sense: a ship assigned to long-ranged cruising and independent action. The Cruiser-class cruiser (cruiser cruiser) is able to do just that. The Cruiser has hundreds of steerage-class quarters for troops (e.g., two infantry battalions), almost 100,000 tons of cargo (e.g., lots of vehicles, if you're not in a hurry), and a DropShuttle bay to land the Righteous Fury of the Terran Alliance on Separatist colonies, at least the bits of Separatist colonies that weren't nuked from orbit, just to be sure. Obviously, the first ship in the class would be named Sulaco.
As it happened, McKenna largely copied a late-22nd Century design and used it for an entirely different purpose that didn't need DropShuttle bays and was left a bit silly for lack of nukes, but that's the Navy for you.
DropShip Collars were well in use by 2305, when the larger Dart Light Cruiser appeared, with no less 6 of them.
Which is a continuity issue for the docking collars (which were established to be common first in the 2400s as long ago as DropShips & JumpShips), but partly addressed by the shortage of proper DropShips in the 2300s.
Admittedly, I did anticipate the Cruiser as being introduced in 2300AD alongside the Dreadnought, but I see those words didn't quite make it to print. The HMA file I submitted was left set as 3025AD. :-[
The ship is light for a Cruiser, it has virtually no point defense weaponry (no machine guns or standard autocannons.)
With capital missiles (no penalty against fighters) and bracket-firing banks of naval autocannons (easy to get -3 to hit with 6 guns in a weapon bay, and get decent to-hit numbers way outside of fighters' weapon ranges) it doesn't need much in the way of standard autocannons. MGs don't do much unless you mount them in large groups, and even then they're only a threat against one weapon bay of missiles per turn per MG bay. A ship like, say, a Cruiser that distributes capital missiles into small weapon bays won't be bothered unless you're carrying ridiculous quantities of MGs.
I mean, something had to inspire the entire SLDF WarShip fleet to skip secondary weapons, right? :)