Boarding parties question

[Aegis]

Ok, first of all when boarding troop transports the nature of the ship needs to be taken into account. The changes proposed are for ships where the marines and the crew intermingle. The entire ship needs to be geared towards holding only a couple of hundred crew members some of the time, and thousands of marines at other times. Facilities like cantinas etc. need to be expanded, after all the regular crew needs these for long voyages, hence the troops, who share facilities will want them too.
The price I think is too high.
Presently it's different. The troops are isolated in the cargo hold. Personally I like this. In fact, the troops may even be cyrogenically frozen for long voyages with minimum hassle. This seems very sensible and cost-effective in the long run. Now, however only the crew is available to defend the ship. On a side note, I do believe these cyrogenically frozen marines are loyal to their empire, so if the ship is taken they should not be available to the border. Either they're jettisoned, or, for the more ethical of us, they are returned to thier families sans weapons. Gameplay-wise of course there would be no difference.

Secondly though, I want to look at the nature of the crew. If there is no crew, but rather a master computer, then theoretically the ship could be built to be boarder resistant. There would be small engineering tubes for repair bots, or with nano-technology even these would not be necessary. To take control of a ship like this would require some sort of computer virus to change the computers character. I would like this, if computer warfare not just included destructive algorithms, but also subversive ones.
If we do have a crew however, then it seems unrealistic that they cannot fight to defend the ship. Here I would prefer if each living quarters was fitted with a defensive value. Ships with people would thus become more resistant to boarding the more living quarters, and hence crew, that were aboard. The defensive value could be set at 25% of the value of defensive lasers( so it would still be worth using these against human opponents, as they are twice as effective per kT), simply as a modification to the present tech. Any of the mod experts out there could do that with ease.

Third, the fact that boarding parties are destroyed after use is not too surprising if they need to crew the enemy ship etc. It would be nice however to decide how many boarders to send.

Finally, requiring ships to be immobile. Hmm. At present I see boarding parties as short-range assault shuttles that attach themselves to the hull and bore through (hence when shields are up their mini-lasers cannot breach them (high damage lasers, but very local => able to breach a hull, but not an energy defence system that moves energy to where the damage is). It would be interesting if low-level boarding parties did indeed require an immobile ship, (i.e. boarders ship needs to attach itself to enemy hull), mid-level could attack a moving ship if it was close range, (as now), high level could attack a ship at range 2 or even 3, and top-level could attack range 3 through normal (but not phased) shields (tranporter tech).