Tactical turnaround in terms of speed and detection may make it worthwhile. Don’t have to approach hydro or gas giant worlds to refuel, punch through lines to get at key targets, forcing a significant proportion of enemy fleet to loiter at key systems several parsecs back.
I can see where blowing past a supposedly secure refuel point would be tactically advantageous, but it's going to be the single biggest cost in your fleet. Spending most of your budget on such a rarely used thing sounds like bad planning, until you need it, and then its genius.
At Jump 3, my Battlerider fleet and my full starship fleet are close to the same in number of spinals (4 Meson N, 2 Particle T) and cost (~250,000 MCr). With a lower Jump rating, the full starship fleets gain the advantage. I would need 3 additional carriers to carry fuel so the tender can double jump, that's about 350,000 MCr, or more than the cost of an entire additional fleet.
So, one way to solve this: if I consider 1 trillion credits to be my subsector budget, I can get 4 Battlerider squadrons, and if I need to double jump, I can pull the carriers off 3 of my 4 squadrons, leaving them as an SDB force, and use their carriers to haul fuel. No extra ships purchased, but a fair amount of time and logistics needed to pull off the flex.
10 MesJ: 10 × Hit 6/36 × Scr 10/36 × Con 26/36 ≈ 0.33 kills. Kills ~4.7% of the MesN ships per round.
7 MesN: 7 × Hit 6/36 × Scr 21/36 × Con 33/36 ≈ 0.62 kills. Kills ~6.2% of the MesJ ships per round.
That is decisive.
If you are fighting the Zho with smaller computers and screens:
10 MesJ: 10 × Hit 10/36 × Scr 21/36 × Con 30/36 ≈ 1.35 kills.
7 MesN: 7 × Hit 10/36 × Scr 30/36 × Con 35/36 ≈ 1.57 kills.
17% more kills, but 30% less hulls for the MesN.
Here the MesJ is better with slightly less kills, but more hulls (more hit points).
Against the Zho's smaller particle spinals, the MesN rider is safe, but the MesJ rider is not, so perhaps the MesN rider is still the better choice?
The better penetration of the Meson Screens and the resistance to Zhodani particle Spinals seem to tip the balance toward the Meson N ships? I'm not sure what the consequence of fewer hulls is on the equation. It'd depend on the level of resistance, I assume?
Sure, but at 40 000 Dt you don't even need the extra armour from a planetoid hull to shrug off particle spinals. At that size you can make it a ship, and dispense with the tender.
Sadly, even a Jump 1 Buf. Planetoid is over 300,000T with 15(+6) armor. With 6 less armor (9+6), it's got the same protection as a normal ship, so takes weapon degrading hits and fuel hits from nukes and spinal particles, but carrying 35% dead weight. You -do- get it down under 60,000 T, but it's as vulnerable to incoming fire as a standard non-buffered ship at that point, so I'm not sure what its doing for you? And it's only Jump 1.
The 40,000T SDB with 15+6 Armor shrugs off
everything but Mesons, has Agility 6 (But loses 1 for size) making it a challenging target for mesons. I can still cram 3 in my SDB Tenders if I want to move them around the subsector, so it's almost as butch as my standard Tender loadout of 4 Mesons and 2 Particles, and it does have 23 missile bays to make up for the lack of particle spinals. So it doesn't threaten the undersized ships with autocrits, but the tradeoff of ignoring nukes and non-meson spinals (and non-spinal mesons, of course, but that's super easy) makes it ideal for hunting the Tigresses and other big game that have zillions of missiles.
At triple the cost (with tender) of a modest smaller MesN rider, the rock is hardly worth it. It will win easily against particle riders, but lose badly to cheap meson riders. Rock-paper-scissors...
So yeah, the 10,000T Meson SDBs will overwhelm it pretty easily. It's absolutely a big game hunter and vulnerable to the tiny stuff. Stuff 3 of those in a Lurenti, though, and you'll run the subsector out of Tigresses and the other giant relics that think huge masses of missiles will help them.
