actually thats not true about star wars not having construction rules. for capital ships, the most current set I have is "starships of the galaxy" I believe
now granted the rules while complete (for certain definitions of complete) are not super detailed. additionally because of star wars "lore" they make some IMO questionable choices, resulting in many ships having MASSIVELY excessive crew compliments. (an imperial star destroyer has a crew of ~30-35,000 people, plus it carries ~10,000 troops with a much cheaper automation you could cut it down to ~1000 crew (and keep the 10,000 troops) while increasing the cargo capacity, weapons or some other aspect.
sorry about the tangent.
my personal issue is I liked a lot of aerospace (first edition) and hate the conversion to fighters being massively simplified into fire factors.
my 2 cents on the subject of lams, is I prefer aerospace 1's version of them but wish there was some tweeks on how the system works rather than the massive throwing the baby out with the bathwater so to speak.
I think a lot of it is that there were some issues and misconceptions on how things were supposed to work, and a few physics errors.
A "Few Physics Errors" in Battletech is like saying that the Ocean is 'a bit moist'.
There's "Physics", and then there's "Fasafiziks".
The only important thing, is to keep the internal logic consistent ENOUGH-like any other magic system in gaming or fiction, while maintaining a consistent "Rule of Kewl".
thus why the ship-art from TRO: 2750 and the ship-art for TRO:3057 don't even bear resemblances that would logically flow from refitting the same hull. (I'll leave the Gif sorting to someone else.)
what looked "Cool and futuristic and possible" in 1986, was superseded by what looked "Kewl" in the 1990s, and the fluff was kind of...strained to make it fit.
but it was ALL an aftethought, that's why consistency even in imagery wasn't considered in any way important.
Thus, also we have three current extant whole game systems to address the same situation, scaling problems, a pile of variant rules (many of which contradict one another directly) and so on.
Getting it consistent isn't a high priority, in part because the fanbase itself can't agree on what it ought to look like, never mind how it ought to work, only that something currently ISN'T working right.
but even there, we can't really agree on WHAT isn't working correctly. For the Devs, this is a nightmare because the amount of sheer hard ass work necessary is unlikely to be accepted by enough people to make doing that work profitable.
As an example, after spanking someone who was using 3050 era Clan forces using a pair of LAMs under aT1 rules, I completely understood why LAMS as they existed at the time, had to go.
it was entirely too easy to make the 'super advanced' Clan warriors look like the cast of Dumb and Dumberer, or like your favorite bumbling cartoon villain from Warner Brothers' height when using what was, at the time, base-level Inner sphere tech in platforms that weren't particularly impressive otherwise. (aka book LAMs)
the Harmony Gold mess just gave the excuse to get rid of it until someone was willing and able to revise the rules to something less irrational.
The problems Aero have, come from its existence as an afterthought. A consistent approach gets complicated when you scale up from Fighters to Dropships, and then goes absurdity when you scale up from that, to Warships.
What's worse still, is that not a lot of effort was put into preventing "I Killzzz dem all wif' my ORBITUL BOMBARDMENT!!111"
because the rules there, weren't all that well thought out initially, either and as a direct outcome, the developers went on a "Let's make them extinct again because this is a record keeping pain in the ass that is unbalanced."
Heavy distortion of outcomes leading to making something as extinct as you can get away with? check.
That distortion being because you didn't really think it through: also check.
You didn't think it through because of fan reactions? double check.
The problem begins in the fanbase, the missteps just amplified the problem, then the fixes get 'lost in the shuffle' of layout and publishing deadlines.
This, too, is not unusual. It's part of why 200 kilos Arrow IV does more AREA EFFECT blast damage than 1000 kilos of air-dropped bomb. The TW bombing rules were balanced against BMR(r) with adjustments from AT2, Tac Ops artillery were a direct port from Munchtek (Maximum Tech's untested optional rules) and unbound, which were NOT balanced against air-drop munitions because those weren't a factor in Munchtek's ruleset.
The claim that it's an aerodynamic problem ignores that a long tom shell's weight has to include propellant, and aerodynamics itself can be applied to under-wing bombs more EASILY than to something that has to resist and survive being fired from a gun.
But, Physics need not apply, only "Fizikz".
