Yup. Large doors help load things fast, like the Crucible and the Caterpillar. The 315p and the Reliant Kore get tractor beams, I think, but only the Caterpillar and the Cutlass get them for free without sacrificing other hard points. This is probably what is going to make those 2 good at piracy.
The IDRIS is something that I would like to try. Large doors in front and back plus a large hangar to stuff full of cargo. Just think of how much SCU that has to be. Say if you used the area in the middle... 20m wide, 10m high, and about 100m long...that's 20,000 cubic meters or 16,000 SCU. That's a LOT of stolen goods that you can move in a protected shell. You don't get to use the hangar for the fighters if you fill it full of stuff, but that's getting close to a Hull D worth of goods in a protected environment. Sure it's expensive, but I'd rather keep all of the expensive weapons and missiles that need to be transported inside of an armored capital ship than a Hull D.
If the IDRIS is set up like a base in an asteroid field somewhere, then pirate squads can come and drop off their stolen loot in the IDRIS until it gets full. Then everyone leaves together and goes back to port with a lot of stuff. If you kept at least 1 bay open during this, then you can still rearm and refuel, though it would require more skill to fly the ship in or out backwards to avoid the towering pile of loot. The IDRIS would make a mobile command center for a multi group operation where several squads of pirates would go out, loot and plunder, then come back to drop off the goods in a secure place before venturing out again. They would not need to go all the way back home, they can just drop things off with Mom and go. Mother ships care for their children.
This would make it so that we could blast an area with lots of piracy attacks in a short time, which would reduce the effectiveness of anyone responding. Say we have 5 teams of 5 ships. 2 Cutlasses, 2 Sabres, and a Caterpillar just running around and looting. Those 5 groups of 5 ships just doing as many smash and grabs as they can, limiting themselves to 5 min for looting. They can hit a location, drop off loot, hit another, drop that off, and keep bouncing around. Even if they didn't take everything on the first pass, they can bounce back to the same ship they hit before and grab more stuff later. With 5 teams hitting so many locations at once, we can fill that IDRIS up in an hour and haul it all back home easily. I feel that doing things quickly is going to benefit us when it comes to not having to deal with respondents.
