It's true that tier three and four SVs still need more practicability to justify their cost. Looking at this design though, it looks more like you're trying to make a frigate than a small craft. I could build almost half a scout cruiser for that much titanium. CVs already have a lower speed cap than SVs. I'm thinking they might also do a lower acceleration cap as well, both linear and rotational. These ships are truly massive, and they should feel that way. As for the SV, I recommend designing your maneuverability profile to focus on only five factors; forward thrust, lifting thrust, negative pitch, and roll. All other aspects can be minimized. This will produce a ship that requires more skill by the pilot to fly, but it will also have a far less cumbersome propulsion and power system for its performance.
I would say it's just a medium sized SV there are enough SVs that are bigger in the Workshop. And while i agree that CVs should not feel more agile as SVs. Your idea on focusing on the listed five factors are interesting but i think when hunting CVs in Atmosphere the actual state is superior to a SV focusing your five factors. Still i am a bit curious how such a SV of yours would look like.
Here's a rough mock-up. The slightly forward large thrusters provide lift, roll, and pitch-up. The high jet thrusters provide some pitch-down and a lot of forward thrust. The small thrusters' position makes them contribute to pitch-up and yaw in addition to providing braking, downwards, and lateral thrust. This thruster profile mimics how modern airplanes maneuver. It doesn't have thrust in a lot of directions. Instead, it has a lot of thrust in two directions it can change quickly. This means a lot of savings in mass, energy consumption, and CPU.
Well like I said, CV acceleration needs to be capped. It could represent the time it takes for thrusters to power up, or a governor system that keeps the ship from tearing itself apart. Even then, CVs can't outrun you. This thruster profile is very adept at barrel rolling, so you could confound a CV's turrets. You may not be able to easily take down a CV with an SV, but if it's built and flown well, you can at least demand their full attention. In a standard survival pvp scenario where your faction wants to protect your base with SV interceptors, I'd say use tier 1-2 non-warp SVs propelled a thruster profile similar to the one pictured and armed with plasma cannons. You could mill these things out in your factories and arm them afterwards. Once the intruder is located, you fly barrel rolls behind him and unload your plasma. His turrets will be mostly ineffective, but your manually-aimed weapons will hit hard. The CV will HAVE to stop and address you or risk being overwhelmed, crippled, and destroyed. Mind you, if they come in force with a bunch of optronic CVs loaded for bear, cheap interceptors like these will be insufficient. Tonnage matters, after all. But against a random poacher or opportunist, it's a decent show of force.
I wrote outmaneuver me not outrun me that's a significant difference there. Anyway first i wait now till i can test my current built.
Ok, so my experience with SV's these days... I gather materials for a while, process those into useful forms, spend 10-15 minutes thinking about the final shape of what I am about to do, build myself a little column of truss blocks, drop my SV Starter on the column and then remove the column and start constructing my SV. Some time later, I'm looking at a nice, grey SV, with all the things I'll need, be it guns, mining lasers, a few decorations, or whatever my vision called for at the time. I dump some fuel into it, pentaxid if it's warp-capable or features a shield generator, hop in the pilot's seat, press Y and start testing its flight handling. I then test all my signal sources to verify I've wired everything correctly, and then spend the next however long it takes deciding how I want to paint the outside, and what I'm going to call this thing. Which is pretty much what I've always done. Every once in a while I find I feel I need another RCS, or a couple of extra thrusters here or there, but that's about it. CPU has never really been an issue for me - I turned it on the moment it was available and never looked back. I forced myself to learn to use this, to even embrace it, as it seemed a perfectly logical and reasonable thing - moving from an Early Access Alpha build, to a more refined Beta build, it just made sense for the power creep to be scaled back. I still say the system is not quite ideal yet, but it has improved quite a bit.
Yeah, acceleration. The ability to change a movement vector. CVs have extremely high thrust-to-mass ratios, so they can change their linear and rotational momentum very quickly. They could do with some capping to their maximum acceleration, and rotational speed now that I think about it.
I think it's an elegant solution. You could tamp down hyper-agile CVs without invalidating their designs the way a thruster nerf would. Now that I think about it, capping CV acceleration might create space for large high-tier SVs with better speed and maneuverability than small CVs. Think like a strategic bomber versus a destroyer.
