docking escorts

[jc173]

Ok I've been toying around with making dockable 80-150 ton fast attack craft/battle riders. I think this is doable at the present but only for human players. It could be workable for the AI if the custom group ability is turned on. Then you could design medium sized components for them. I'm currently letting them just use fighter sized components for cockpits and life support, but have bumped up the number of life supports needed.

I've done them as fighter so far because I don't think they should be able to make warp point jumps without a carrier/tender.

Problems so far:
They can be targeted by PD weapons, I guess this is somewhat balanced out by not needing repairs.

They don't require maintenance, but they also cannot be upgraded so I guess its a trade off.

Weapons, I've continued to let them use the fighter sized weapons to represent secondary batteries or light back up weapons. I'm modding/copying some of the regular ship weapons so they can use them also. The problem with this is that so far they are extremely deadly if there is a stack of battleriders. I'm thinking of making some sort of medium sized beam weapons for them as a compromise. I'm also modding some of the regular missile weapons to make smaller one shot variations like the rocket pods used by the fighters.

It's going to be probably a week or so before I can finish this off, but would anyone be interested in testing out to see how well this works?