I disagree on the design decision to have the minefields centered around a monitor instead of a station. Its a rather large increase in costs for something that will be stationary nearly all the time anyway. I've given my own try at creating a design for a 3000t buffered planetoid that should be around 200 MCr. cheaper than the monitor, though it'll be about 100 MCr. more expensive than the MDS for its increased survivability. It also possesses far more direct combat capability on the station itself versus the monitor being nearly entirely reliant on the minefield.
[X] Plan Rocky Islands
-[X] We should propose offering more land on Home.
-[X] Other - write in
--[X] 3x 3000t defensive stations designed for survivability and to command minefields built into a buffered planetoid
-[X] Write-in: In addition to the patrol carrier, send the MAT alongside any spare escorting ships we can spare to Omarov.
-[X] Write-in: establish best practices for new military construction, such as hardening systems which draw power and are combat-critical.
While we discussed this elsewhere, I'd reiterate that the choice of a monitor (or a "self-propelled station" as I was calling it previously) is because I want to avoid the maluses that come from being stationary. At a superficial level, this means that a ship shooting at a stationary target hits about 40 percentage points more often; if you include the effects of software and the pilot taking Evasive Action, it's 60 percentage points more often. If our ship gets hit 10% of the time, it'd get hit 70% of the time if it were stationary, and so forth. This math is ofc rough because 2d6 is nonlinear, but it averages out to
about this.
Normally, this isn't a decisive issue, but the LMDC is a new threat and one which causes serious issues. A LMDC-armed warship could take shots at the station; normally we'd be able to reduce the damage to very infrequent through the combination of evasion piloting checks, Evade/1 software, and not having that -4 modifier. However, if we cannot evade or take advantage of the Evade/1 software package, and have that -4 modifier, shots from Distant range can start to connect. That forces us to try and scare off a warship that's hovering 300,000 km away from our station. Right now, our approach to that is to fire enough torpedoes that one of them will get past the target's evasion and point defence. However, at 300,000 km away (so around 250,000 km from the edge of our minefield), it'll take so long for the torpedoes to arrive that the target can jump out before they arrive. Yes, that means they use up fuel, but it also weakens the minefield; if they have a refuelling tanker outside the system that we don't know about, then they can just keep repeatedly jumping in, taking a shot with a LMDC, and then leaving, and in doing so weaken our defences until there's either nothing left or a resupply mission arrives.
@Rat King mentioned a 300 ton non-jump-capable LMDC boat, and I suspect you could make a 2-jump variant of that on around 500-800 tons. It'd be very embarassing to lose a station to death by a thousand cuts from that.
The cost of the drive itself is not as significant as you make it out to be. On the most aggressively scaled-down design I showed, the drive and its required powerplant is only about 80 MCr. I think 80 MCr is worth it when the potential method of defeating an immobile, isolated station has already been brought up.
Edit: Correction, I just checked the barrage table.
An increase in 6 points turns what would normally be 10% damage into
150% damage.