[PvK]

I don't know if boarding parties work on fighters or not. If they did, they should get a reload time of 30 to prevent one fighter from capturing dozens of small ships. The boarding strength should probably be low enough that it could only capture a ship with one crew quarters and no defensive troops. Since boarding attacks can't combine, this would make for kind of a limited surprise design, although I guess it could be useful against a player or AI that liked to use lots of small ships without shields.

I suppose a REALLY large fighter could be made just to hold a really large boarding party weapon that would have enough men to overcome larger security forces, but it should be very expensive and have reload 30, and the fighter should be slow and not so hard to hit, if it's going to be at all balanced versus conventional ship-mounted boarding parties, because the fighter ones will not require repair after use, and will not have a maintenance cost, and will not require a ship to carry them and lower their own shields to use them, all of which are major advantages.

As for carrying troops, a fighter can't do that, because units can't carry other units. The landing shuttle would have to be a small ship, in which case it'd have to fly to a target by itself, because nothing can carry ships.

Proportions 2.1 can and should be used with existing 2.0 games, I would say. The only major change to existing stuff will be heavy ship mounts, which will suddenly require less space and cost more, meaning designs that use them can now be upgraded to include some more stuff.

There might be an issue with the new Gold patch and Proportions - I ran a test game in Gold 1.66 and the AI wasn't building colony ships, whereas it definitely was with the same Version of Proportions on Gold 1.60. I'll try to figure that out by this weekend sometime.

PvK