Don't have T5, haven't seen ACS.
While I appreciate the "hunting for food" vs "hunting for sport" analogy, and the "What Marc wants combat to feel like", that doesn't mean that ships aren't designed for combat.
Perhaps the Free Trader is not, but the ever present, lovable SDB is designed for combat.
We've had a few enduring designs that have been within the Imperium for years and years, but it's not really even clear that the designs are actually good at what they're supposed to do, or viable in the large. Does a 400dT SDB make any sense in a universe of 50K ton battle cruisers?
The long running chatter in the other threads about organization, ThingRons, and how what ships do what, are all well and good. They add great color. But we don't know if the ships are necessary in actual combat, or whatever other role they play.
I've advocated for the longest time that Combat be designed first, ships designed for combat, and then organized from there. That a FF&S be used (or used as a basis) that lets the players make their designs as crunchy as they want, but then an ACS be built on top of the FF&S version, with basically pre-built modules that snap in to standard hulls. Make some assumptions, round some numbers, stack up some tables, and snap it all together to where you have a simpler to design ship that flies and fights and jumps and burns fuel just like it was designed in the more complicated system.
Maybe it doesn't fight or fly as efficiently as custom designed ship, but odds are, in the end, that efficiency isn't enough to turn the tide of a battle or the overarching narrative of the story, not in "adventure" mode.
I understand it's a tough problem. A system that needs to behave consistently at the small ship and big ship level, and ideally, have some operational attributes considered so that when fleets are loaded out there is a sense as to what these ships do, and why they are the way they are. All that for a system that's really designed to make a Free Trader lift off from a planet, fly to 100D and Jump. Tough problem indeed.
But in the end, you can't consider the design system and combat system independently of each other. Star Fleet Battles does that to some point. They never published a design system. In truth, they never published a scoring system. They had their "BPV" rating for their ships, and by not publishing the underlying mechanics of the system, they reserved the right to tweak the values to balance the ships out to try and encourage a reasonably fair fight when squadrons of similar point values fought each other. Game balance was a very important design tenet of SFB, and they knew they couldn't publish a "balanced" point system. The players are simply to clever for it, and as the players worked out the problems, SFB added rule limitations to rein in abuse.
There's no call to go that far in Traveller. But if the Imperium is flying CruRons with escorts, it would be nice if they were doing so for reasons other than color. Other than "what Marc feels a squadron would look like". If Marc feels that way, then put some effort in to the combat system that reinforces that if a player were to build such a fleet, when "Hunting for Sport", he would see that, for whatever reasons, the underlying design and combat systems make CruRons with Escorts a sound, reasonable design. They should reinforce each other.
I didn't want to suggest that was easy either.
Is all that necessary to build a Free Trader? No, not really, but, it makes the Free Trader make sense. Much like the comments on the Trade system. If I have a Free Trader, and use the trade system, and can't reasonably make a go of it, then there's something wrong with the system or the ship. They're out of balance.
When you have that richness of the underlying design, then when we see SDBs patrolling the 90D limit, of the inner Gas Giant, laying in wait, then we know that the SDB design and squadron organization, whatever it may be, is a smart design. It's going to be dangerous and a deterrent to an invading fleet. The invaders are going to think twice about it.
Ships are built and designed the way they are for a reason, not just color. The combat system documents those reasons, and the design system allows ships to be manifest in performance of their roles.
