You said you have a group to crew it. How large a group and have they individually consented to crew?
I think most players are not willing to commit to just one activity. The Idris is a long haul ship. For best use it will need to be out on the fringes. Perhaps raiding Vanduul space and glory farming?
Optimally, you will want a crew who all have second accounts and will commit one to crew your ship, some predetermined number of days each week. Additionally, you’ll want several above the crew requirement, because some won’t show, and some you’ll need for landing and boarding parties. Also you’ll need pilots for your fighters.
Unless you can get about 30 players to make this sort of commitment, I would strongly urge you consider other options. However, I think what we will find is that to run missions effectively, the Polaris is going to require almost as much crew as the Idris. It will however generate a lot more player activity—fewer boring jobs.
The Idris fills the role of a frigate, and is thus the ubiquitous “ship of the line”. It’s intended to be multi-role inside a fleet, but can manage alone quite well.
The Polaris is really more like a submarine, but for its torpedoes to be useful, it needs scout craft lighting up targets 20+km away while it hides. So you absolutely need as many scout craft on the Polaris as you can get. They need to be fast, stealthy and take up little deck space. Arrows might be a good choice. Let’s say you have eight arrows crammed into the Polaris’ hangar bay.
The Arrows will be flying virtually whenever you are hunting. They will probably be needed to shepherd the torps in to their target, since torps are horribly slow compared to the fighters that would shoot them down.
That means additional crew. You can’t rob all the guys off the turrets every time you go into battle. So in the end, the Polaris crew is about the same size as the Idris.
So why bother with the Polaris? Quite simple: it’s going to create very different gameplay. The Polaris is intended for cat and mouse games, hunting games, sneaky torpedo games. The Idris just wants to find big ships and fight them. Two very different play styles.
And that’s what you need to suggest to your crew. After all, you need to sell them you, as their Captain. What kind of playtime are you going to offer?
You should be able to earn enough in the Sons of Orion storyline to keep the ship active. That’s what it’s for. So I would not be too concerned about having industrial ships to support it. Running either an Idris or a Polaris is a full time job. Comes with the Captain’s bars.
On a final note, I still think there are ways to use the Liberator as a mobile strike platform using 3 Eclipse, 9 Arrows and 4 Lancer MIS (for their beds and long range missile support). Richard Bong has noted the pads on the Lib are not rated for the Eclipse, whereas I’m thinking “if it sits, it fits.” Guess we’ll have to wait and see. This scenario puts 16 stealth craft on targets quite distant from the Lib, so is more like an aircraft carrier. This actually requires about 2/3 the crew of the Idris and Polaris, but still a lot of player management; so something else to keep in mind.
Each of these options can be deadly to the other two and none has a clear benefit above the others that I can see except that the Lib is cheaper and requires less crew. The other ships would certainly offer a nicer home and a pool table.
Yes, if you settle on an Idris, get the K. It will require fewer crew and just firing that big chin gun is going to be a kick!
