I was curious whether or not a viable pocket warship design could be made with 3025 tech. It looks like the answer is "yes", and even "yes, via scavenging".
Ingredients:
1 Excalibur drive (hard to get)
1 Fortress (missing drive ok) (very hard to get)
24 Long Tom Cannons (super hard to get)
48 small lasers (easy)
armor and structure (easy)
Several months in a naval repair facility (hard to get)
Step 1: Extract Fortress drive, 12 mech bays, 12 vehicle bays, 2 infantry bays, and all weapons.
Step 2: Insert Excalibur drive.
Step 3: Increase structural integrity from 13 to 60
Step 4: Add 169.5 tons of armor
Step 5: Add 12 Long Tom Cannons in the nose and 12 Aft
Step 6: Add 12 Small Lasers to Fore and Aft side locations
You end up with something like this:
Black Fortress
6000 Ton Spheroid (inner sphere, 3025)
8 Thrust
12 Max Thrust
60 Structural Integrity
12000 Fuel Points
217.39 burn-days of Fuel
Armor:
924 Nose
924 Left Side
924 Right Side
924 Aft
Battle Value: 22428.3
Cost: 823M C-bills
Tons Item
3120 Engine
400 Fuel
8 Pumps
720 Structure
45 Control Systems
70 7 Officers quarters
245 35 crew quarters
216 armor
28 4 Escape Pods
35 5 Lifeboats
143 Heatsinks (+145 free)
5 Infantry Bay
269 Cargo
Heat 240:
168 6 Long Tom Cannon w/ 40 rounds of ammo each, Nose
56 2 Long Tom Cannon w/ 40 rounds of ammo each, Nose
56 2 Long Tom Cannon w/ 40 rounds of ammo each, Nose
56 2 Long Tom Cannon w/ 40 rounds of ammo each, Nose
Heat 240:
168 6 Long Tom Cannon w/ 40 rounds of ammo each, Aft
56 2 Long Tom Cannon w/ 40 rounds of ammo each, Aft
56 2 Long Tom Cannon w/ 40 rounds of ammo each, Aft
56 2 Long Tom Cannon w/ 40 rounds of ammo each, Aft
Heat 12:
6 12 Small Lasers (bays of 2) Fore-Left
Heat 12:
6 12 Small Lasers (bays of 2) Fore-Right
Heat 12:
6 12 Small Lasers (bays of 2) Aft-Left
Heat 12:
6 12 Small Lasers (bays of 2) Aft-Right
This thing is clearly very expensive. Is it effective?---In 3025, it's a nightmare, far more so than a conventional warship which ASF can swarm. In later years, it is merely dangerous.
Dropship fighter:
Against other dropships, the Black Fortress is deadly. It can hit with 120+40+40+40=240 points of damage at long range and has the speed and endurance to stay at long range indefinitely. Furthermore, the only long range weapon other period dropships employ is the LRM, which the laser array can quench via point defense.
ASF fighter:
Against an ASF fighter only light ASF are faster, with the Black Fortress able to ECHO to bring either front or aft arcs to bear after losing initiative. The bay with 6 LTCs deals a "you're dead" 120 point shot at long range while a bay with 2 deals "you're a dead scout" 40 points to light ASF. According to the errata, "the damage type is still considered AE", so that is 120 or 40 points of damage to every ASF occupying the same hex. Hence the big bay can kill an entire wing of heavy ASF is one shot. The small lasers can deliver a substantial 36 damage/arc to any light ASF that manage to sneak under the big guns.
Battlefield support:
There is plenty of fuel to 'squat' above a battlefield and deliver strike attacks with the LTCs. 240 points of AE damage can end just about any ground unit. Remember that you can target a hex. You don't get the -4 bonus to hit, but you do avoid all penalties due to movement of things in that hex or in adjacent hexes. Remember that you do 120 damage into adjacent hexes. Ground units can return fire with longer range weapons, so for proper use this tactic should be deployed during a battle when opponents are distracted by friendly ground units.
High speed engagements:
Break contact: +8 bonus from Thrust
Intercept: +4 bonus from Thrust/2
Decelerating provides a -4 bonus to hit from Max Thrust/3
The aft weapons are fully as formidable as the forward ones so attacking butt-first is relatively ok..
LTCs fire as autocannon and hence do x1.5 (slow), x2(medium), or x4 (fast) damage. Would you like 960 damage with that?
Some notes:
The customization rules clearly allow this sort of thing. The fluff of sticking an Excalibur engine in seems substantially more plausible than making a custom engine in 3025.
The Excalibur drive is exactly the right size (tonnage) and type (spheroid) to make the Fortress go 8/12. Are there other such combinations? Very few.
An Achilles and a Condor are aerodynes of the same mass. A Condor assault dropship would have the advantage that it could go in atmosphere.
The Fury, Leopard, and Leopard-CV are all the same mass and speed.
The Intruder is precisely half the mass of a Fortress, and hence a Fortress engine is the right size to make an Intruder go 6/9.
The Mammoth has 4 engines, one of which is precisely the right size to make an Intruder go 13/20...
There is one other weapon which does AE damage in space: it's the Screen Launcher. Munitions are radically heavier, although the blocking LOS effect has many additional tactical applications.
I kept fuel, pumps, control systems, officer quarters, crew quarters, escape pods, and lifeboats unchanged from the Fortress for simplicity. Only 18 crew are required, so a couple hundred extra tons could be scrounged up by minimizing them. Alternatively, there are 24 extra quarters, so adding just 4 more would imply the infantry are all in quarters. The infantry are essentially meant for ship security, which seems well-justified on a ship so valuable.
The ship can fire either the nose or aft LTCs + all small lasers each round. We could add an extra 240 heat sinks to enable firing everything although that eliminates the cargo space.
Why bays of 2 for the small lasers? In essence, targeting flexibility for point defense seems the dominating desire.
Edit: Further development:
If a new heavily armored thrust 8 smallcraft design could be created, then 1 or 2 would be nicely complimentary, since they would provide smallcraft ECM adding +1 to hit for all ASF. Fitting one is easy, by cannibalizing existing cargo space. Fitting two would be more difficult but possibly by further cannibalizing quarters. The feasibility of creating the new engines for such a smallcraft seems to be the primary difficulty given the time period.