This is exactly what I was looking for - some perspective - because when this idea hit me it seemed almost too perfect. Very good analysis, to my eye - I love all the points you went over in this. Docked chambers are definitely going to require a lot of finesse to pull off, but so has docking in general, so it follows.
I completely see the reasoning in
#4, and I
almost agree, but have reservations about heading off drone-swarms, which would almost certainly make a showing during first release of something like this before being balanced out.
I really love the idea of crew as a counter to efficiency fall-off from scale on large ships. It would also be nice to see them as at least a factor in improving system stability, offsetting outages, preventing overheats, etc - especially on larger ships (fighters will have to wait for R2D2 droids to offset their outages...
)
By making crew an offset to efficiency loss rather than a buff, we would automatically give the maximum performance rate to ships beneath the threshold for crewed compartments if they had well-arranged chambers. This
could be off-base and set up a major imbalance, but I'm not entirely sure that allowing small ships (particularly player-manned ones) a natural edge would be all bad.
More importantly and a bit more meta here -
it would serve to incentivize building small for newer players; which would be vital to improved new-player conversion, IMO.
The learning curve is already damn steep. A crew system like this would shift the curve into full vertical. A new player attempting to build a super-complex manned vessel, where just the reactor system itself takes an hour to lay out, would yield pretty high odds of a rage-quit and perma-hate... So by making crew itself about falloff in chamber function and offsetting outages and overheats, the advantage of larger vessels becomes more durability and resilience at the cost of block economy, the edge for smaller ships becomes extreme cost-efficiency (per-component block value would be better) and much greater simplicity of optimization at the cost of being easily crippled and or destroyed.
This way, novice players can be happy getting maximum return on their components keeping things to a max size of gunship/corvette/escort, and would be able to do a lot of basic pirating, trade, exploration, mining and escort work without having to grok the entire set of interlocked dynamics at play. After some time doing that and growing adept at system integration, it would be a new challenge and puzzle to figure out how to use crews to strive for similar optimization levels from larger and larger vessels, a task probably best approached in teams.
Of course if the answer to crew effect on chambers
were that it offset efficiency falloff, as suggested, then in order to prevent droneswarm spam used to exploit the simpler and more economical small ship dynamics, we would need severe, hard fleet limits, with expansion tied into the presence of at least one small capital ship with a fleet bridge compartment/chamber that gave it fleet command abilities at varying levels. That way nuggets would either have to solo it or maybe be able to command 2-4 wingmen, but for larger forces one would eventually have to explore the intricacies of building larger ships, and in order to keep those large ships from being very inefficient one would want to learn how to properly crew a vessel.
All that sounds like a great end-result, but you know that until it got all the way there the community would be losing its collective mind about OP small ships due to chamber efficiency falloff on larger vessels. Not sure if we could endure such a thing for 6-18 months (or years or whatever, right?) until it was sorted...